rohitj's domain

Having used Gnome, KDE, Unity among other desktop environments, having seen the designs like desktops, workspaces and activities, I still find somethings missing, somethings very important. I will explain it with few examples :

1) Recently, a friend of mine (an android user) had an episode. She was in class and her Pandora application in her android phone started playing music all of a sudden. She had her phone in silent mode, but supposedly android (and now ubuntu (not sure about other distributions)) has different sound settings for different applications. Hence, a silent mode did not ensure that Pandora didn’t create sound.

2) I usually put my laptop on sleep mode when traveling from one place to another. One time, I took my laptop for presentation, and on projector people could see that my current tab was facebook and I was playing some song. Similar thing happens when I go to talk, and open my laptop to work while listening to talk.

3) I work on my laptop. At home, I have an external monitor where I prefer to use Skype and I like a bigger font, and none of the windows are full screen.

4) When I am working, I have a certain set of applications and when I am not working, I have a different set of applications. When I am not working, I don’t want my work applications to waste my system resources, and vice-versa. Also when I switch between these modes, I want certain applications and settings to start or quit.

Now, with activities or workspaces or desktops, you can separate applications from 2 kinds of environments, but most of the environment settings are still shared. For example, audio will still be the same on both activities, and probably font size as well. Also, both activities run in parallel. There is no way for a user to say that I am going into work mode and hence these set of applications should start automatically.

It will be really nice to have an additional feature so that, when I log in or unlock screen, I am asked what kind of environment I want, so that I could pick if I need my audio to be mute or not. If I want only a particular set of applications to be visible or not. Such things are not really important for desktops as desktops stay in similar environment, but laptops change environment very frequently, from lab to home to presentation to talk. One can not always ensure that the desired settings are indeed enabled before a mishap happens.

What I don’t understand is how come no one has addressed this. Also, to my understand, it should rather be simple to atleast achieve partial goals in this line.

So, we are trying to resurrect the almost dead Linux User Group at Purdue (PLUG). We (I shouldn’t be using we, but anyways) had our first event today. A Talk on “Introduction to Open Source”. Seems like lack (none?) of advertisement did affect the turn out. 10-15 students were present including 2 apache contributors. I gave the talk. We had some nice questions at the end, and I am happy about that.

Below are the slides I used for the same. Some people from Navya suggested that I mixed up Free Culture ideas with Open Source in these slides, but I believe there is an overlap, and I used that overlap. But anyways, I still hope it gave some perspective to audience. I would love to hear your feedback on it.

For those who were curious about how I made the slides. I used Latex and a document style called “beamer”  Think link might be useful : beamer

[0] Tex file
[1] PDF File

Continuing my post about business models for open source, here are some other things which make me think if open source is right way.

0) Well, as usual the first thing that I am able to think of is Office Suit. I am thinking of getting a tablet pc. I have wanted a touch screen laptop for long time time. Now, with touch screen I want to write notes and I want it to convert to text by itself. I owned a windows mobile for sometime. I used to use MS Word in it. And believe it or not, it was awesome. Handwriting recognition worked very good (after a small amount of practice, of course). Is there such thing in open source world? I bet not. Why not? Because it require research and lot of work. And then open sourcing it of course doesn’t make sense.

1) As all of you agree Evolution is a dead end. Thunderbird is good. I use Kontact though. I like to use default applications. This makes things look decent, and interconnectivity better. I did not shift to KDE4 untill KDE4.1 came. At 4.1, I expected things to work a little stable. Let me tell you a funny story about Kontact. In 4.1.0, if you close kill Kontact, you account information used to get vanish. Thankfully not the emails. So, you have to enter all the account settings again. In 4.1.4 things got improved, it stopped happening. But 2 days back, this happened again. I do not know why. I haven’t tried regenerating that problem. Another problem is that if I don’t give the kwallet password for sometime, it starts asking for password for accounts. Now this is ridiculous. There is no point asking for account password unless I am giving wrong password for kwallet. And when it ask for account password, and you don’t give it, rather you you logoff, it will ask for this password even if you give kwallet password. What a ridiculous sytem. You can not even properly store data. The worst part is the removal of all account settings. What a crappy thing must be going on inside that your data written in files is gone. Now this is called lack of structure. How did they even think of making a program which can remove data from a file. I am not able to think of any excuse for this problem.

2) PDF is an open standard. I use pdf a lot. But it seems that there is no proper software in ubuntu repository that could render pdf properly. I am mainly talking about different standard symbols used. Like ‘belong to’ sign, ‘equivalent’ sign and so on. Now these are very-very popular symbols. Open source people are not even able to support open standards, how worse can it get. (I tried using Okular and Evince, latest versions in ubuntu intrepid repositories.)

An interesting thing happened yesterday. Supreme Court of India said that content on a blog is your responsibility. And the disclaimer “views expressed on the blog are that of the writers” will not help you at all. Here is the news link. This happened after someone started an orkut community against Shiv Sena. And of course, content became vulgar. Those who don’t know, Shiv Sena is a group of extremist Hindus. I think they usually are bad in expressing their views, which usually involves violence. But anyways, this raises the question of Freedom of Speech. Does it snatch that freedom? If it does, is that right?

Few months back, there was an arrest. The guy made an Orkut community “I hate Sonia Gandhi”. And posted some vulgars comments as well. Here is the news link. Now, I hate Sonia Gandhi as well, and it seems Police and court accepted that its fine to hate Sonia Gandhi, and its fine to even write that. But writing opinions in vulgar language was not accepted. And hence the guy was arrested. (on a side note, google gave information about the guy to the police). Those who don’t know, Sonia Gandhi is Congress President. Congress is the ruling party in India right now. Sonia Gandhi, according to me, is dumb. I don’t think she knows anything about India.

So, the question is, is it really against the fundamental rights of expression and speech? It might be interesting to note that anti-campaigning in India is not allowed. Which means that to promote your product, you can not say that other products are bad. And to promote your party in elections, you can not say other parties are bad. Those who don’t know, in US you can do anti-campaigning. Now, I am not sure what is right. Should vulgar language be allowed in public? If yes, then of course it should be allowed on web as well. If not, it shouldn’t be allowed on web as well. And visa-versa.

I don’t think I like the concept of anti-campaigning. And I don’t think I like the concept of vulgar language in public places. Internet has become very important and very used part of communication system. And so, the etiquettes we teach the children and expect from people in general should be applicable on web as well. Why is it that a guy should be allowed to use vulgar language on web, but not in public places? (socially and legally both)

I went to a group meeting. Usually, my laptop is not used for projector. But since, everyone else had mac, and they didn’t have the connector, I had to use my laptop. I had to restart X to get the projector working. Now, my default my KDE starts kopete, firefox, kontact, amarok, skype, plasma. The worst is plasma, skype and kopete. Plasma because I have this photobox on my desktop which shows pictures. Now, there is no objectional photo being displayed, but I still want to avoid showing that in public, because they are a little private. Skype because it doesn’t start in minimized mode. Kopete because it starts showing offline messages. Also, the sound. Now when I am in a group meeting, I want my desktop to be a little formal. I don’t want all this on startup. But when I am using it for normal purpose, I want all these things. So, here is the wishlist. Is it possible that on start, I could have an option to start the Window Manager in a formal mode, or unformal mode. Like I have an option to select between gnome and kde on start. I strongly believe that its a really important feature, and it should be available. Since I use mostly KDE applications, I believe KDE framework should have such facility. It will also be easier that way.

That time of year has come again. IIT Kanpur is again busy preparing for Techkriti. I don’t think I will ever forget those days. Being a part of team makes it even more exciting. Specially those 4 days of drill. I wish I was there. Last year we added another branch to Techkriti. We called it FOSSKriti. I joined the team late, but I still enjoyed it to the full. Since it was the first event of this kind in Techkriti and IIT (not just IITK) in general, things were a little blurred. We didn’t get that much attention from Techkriti. But still most of the time, the rooms we had booked for talks or hackfests were full. The event was a success. We are again organizing FOSSKriti. I am more excited about this times FOSSKriti. This time amidst all initial doubts we have better layout of the events. And we again have awesome chain of talks and hackfests. This times theme is “Open Web”.

Mozilla Corporation is sponsoring this times FOSSKriti. We have speakers from Mozilla, Opera, Yahoo, KDE, Sahana and Drupal. They will be giving talks and hackfests, apart from other small scale sessions. The details for the events can be seen here : http://techkriti.org/#/fosskriti-events/

Here are the topics for the events :

• Workshop : Web development and Open Source technologies
• Talk : An Introduction to HTML5
• Talk : Yahoo! UI
• Hackfest : Drupal 7 Patch and Development Sprint
• Talk : Open the Web
• Talk : Humanitarian FOSS: Sahana Open Source Disaster Management tool
• Hackfest: Code for Sahana in Web2Py
• Talk : Webkit and Telepathy

Apart from these events, there will be few small sessions. Go to the FOSSKriti stalls to know more about these sessions. Oh, we will have a PGP Key signing party as well. Don’t forget to go there.

I bought my laptop in India. In India, I didn’t use my DVD drive to play movies much, because all the time when I wanted to watch a movie/song, I used to get the pirated avi/mp3 file. Now, recently I rented few DVDs and none worked. I tried everything, nothing worked. Even when I have been using Linux exclusively for more than 2 years now, I always have a feeling that if things are not working than its the Linux bug. So I cursed Ubuntu for having bugs. But I really wanted to watch movie, so I explored more, and found out it was the region code problem. Some non-social people started this concept of regions so that DVDs work only in a area, and wouldn’t work in other areas. Thankfully, you can change your region code 5 times. So, I change my region from India to US, and things are working now. This is really a ridiculous thing though. I was talking with a friend who is American and she said that she has problems watching international movies because the international DVDs they buy in US they are sometimes in different region code. Now, for people like me who love watching Hindi, English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and what not language movies, its a big trouble. Isn’t it funny that those who are paying money to buy these DVDs face this problem. And those who don’t (like I never bought a movie DVD, I always got the pirated avi files), its so easier. I mean, this is really stupid. The only people who you can restrict are the ones who are paying for it, not the ones who are downloading the pirated copies. I guess its just about putting too much restrictions for no reasons.

My the best memories of Cricket are of course that of Sachin’s. His batting is the only thing that makes me watch cricket. I can not also forget those awesome innings which Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly played together. No doubt most of the Indians enjoyed Saurabh Ganguly’s glory days. Then came the time when he slipped down in performance (and team spirit as well I believe). Anyways, it was his last inning 2 days back. A test match against Australia. His performance was good in first inning. But in second inning, he got out duck. Zero runs in last inning of his test cricket life. Surely a sad story. But then Bradman also got Duck in his last inning. Anyways, of course his fans and his rivals put that video of his last inning on youtube. Since I don’t watch TV, I turned to youtube to watch that final moments, but it so seems that BCCI has made google remove those videos. Why? Well, I don’t know. BCCI doesn’t even have the copyright on those videos. This is what youtube says about those videos “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Board of Control for Cricket in India”. No, I do not understand. First of all, BCCI doesn’t own any copyright on these videos. Second of all, even if they were afraid that people will insult Ganguly, where is the freedom of expression. Didn’t they insult Ganguly by kicking him out of team for sometime. And didn’t they insult him by making him play under a junior’s captaincy who once played under Ganguly’s captancy. And what about the fans? The fans who couldn’t watch his last inning. BCCI simply snatched the freedom of expression. And of course Google supported them.

There are 3 posts that I started writing and left incomplete. So, here is the tiny summary to everything:

• I am alive.
• Nostalgia has been replaced by load of technical work. Thank God!!
• Proposal for NERD (a new magazine in IITK which is going to talk about research and development and FOSS and Free Culture) has been approved. The magazine will be released under a CC license (probably CC-BY-SA). Final Compilation of the articles is going on.
• I am admin for some Windows machines now. Can not make the company shift to open source, its impossible. And its a family affair, so I can not deny the work. But this made me believe it even stronger that shifting from windows to linux is as difficult as shifting from linux to windows.
• finally made a flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohitjiitk/ ….. there are 1-2 photos from my small, yet dangerous hike near a national park
• I have got an XBox. Its bulky, so I can not take it to US, otherwise I would have installed xebian on it. I do not know what to do with it.
• Finally a family trip seems to become reality. We are going to Manali and Rohtang Pas. A 5 day trip, with all luxury.
• Lot of Mangoes …. after 2 Mango-less summers. ….. and before 4-5 mango-less summers
• Finally met my old and gold friends Aakash and Sachin
• The “personal” stuff here, no more exists.
• deleted my orkut account. Only gmail left.

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.