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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

I have been thinking about business models for open source softwares. Though I couldn’t come up with proper answer. Lets see, let me try to start with different software people make and use.

Office : No doubt it needs very big amount of work. And if someone puts this much effort to make an Office package, why will he give it away for free? Of course not, it doesn’t make sense. Probably thats the reason why we do not have any open-source Office software. And surely Microsoft Office is way too good. OOo is dumped for long time now.

Matlab, Visual Studio etc : Again it requires big amount of investment and hard work. No reason one should give it away for free. Though yeah Eclipse is there. And I must say that it is very good. But isn’t it a way in which IBM is earning publicity? And isn’t it same with netbeans as well.

Computer Games : Again too much work and proficiency.

Operating System : Again, do you think open source can help make an Operating System any better? Oh yeah, bug fixing.. probably yes, but without incentive why will someone do quality work? Every second day one thing or another is broken. But yeah surely, like Redhat is doing, good things are possible with it, specially for server side technologies.

Other Desktop Applications :  Amarok, they are fighting to get funds… Is there any good voice chat client? Ekiga? does support proxy. Skype? no more an open source project. Gaim? not yet. Now don’t say that they are fighting in reverse engineering and other bullshit. Firefox? don’t you know that people start with Firefox but do not stick to it for long time. Thats a popular observation, isn’t it. Evolution? I wish they come up with something good. Though I guess they are also having problems (because of open source nature? I guess yes.)

I am not saying that open source is right or wrong. But at the end of the day, what a user wants is good software, softwares in which he need not be a geek to solve the problem. And surely as of now, I do not see open source work to give any good  reply to this need. You may say that Gutsy is a solution, or fedora 8 is awesome, and these distros solves most of the problems. But don’t you think you have been giving these arguments for last 20 years? When fedora 5 came, everyone said the same. When fedora 6 came same. And same goes with Ubuntu.

Its a great pleasure to announce that Tata guys have come up with a supercomputer which is ranked 4th fastest in the world, and fastest in Asia.

I am happy for 2 reasons

1. that India did it again. (remember param2000?)
2. that the computer uses Linux

Tata is the only company that has maintained its reputation for long time now. Even when TCS is criticized sometimes, Tata has maintained its reputation. Those who do not know, Tata’s most of the money goes to charity work. I am using the word “goes” not “will”. I love this group.

For more details check the original post.

So, yesterday night came this new member in our wing. He was sitting in corridor in front of my room. I heard Shankar doing some thing, so opened the door and found Shanky patting this dude. He probably wasn’t feeling good because of cold, and hence came to our wing. Its an awesome experience to have a room in front of lawn. I get to see lots of animals, and sometimes shoot them with my FE210 camera. Well, I will soon buy a DSLR, but till then I am trying with this camera.

So, I brought my camera, started taking photos. This guy didn’t like flash at all. He tried running, I ran after him. And when he found that he can not beat me on this relatively slippery for dogs floor, he stopped. I patted his head so he feels comfortable, and then started photo session. Though, I didn’t mean to take any good shots (lolz), and rather I thought I didn’t take any good shots, my friends asked me upload the photos on Orkut. And I did. And I got some cool responses. One guy even copied the photos, and posted it on his album. [:)] …. and this other guy, who probably never sent me a message, asked me how I got that dog to do all those things? I hope it’s not just because it was my first time.

So, anyways, the photo captions goes with the saying of Mahatma Gandhi : ” Bura mat dekho” which means don’t see bad things. “Bura mat suno” don’t listen to bad things and “Bura mat kaho”, don’t speak bad words.

Bura mat dekho

Bura mat suno

Bura kahna allowed hai (Speaking bad things is allowed)

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose said that English strategy was “Divide and Conqueror”. I think the following image says more than that.