rohitj's domain » FOSS

Activities, Workspace, Desktop : I need more

rohitj — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:45:57 +0000

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.

PLUG Talk : Introduction to Open Source

rohitj — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:12:15 +0000

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

Why not open source

rohitj — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:22:02 +0000

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.)

Wishlist regarding KDE/Window Managers

rohitj — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:26:49 +0000

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.

FOSSKriti 09

rohitj — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:45:02 +0000

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.

Yes, I am alive

rohitj — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:49:14 +0000

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.

My first XChat plugin :)

rohitj — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:48:10 +0000

Recently I started using IRC a lot. As I was doing some django, PyQT and KDE/C++ development. Yes, its lot of development. And then whenever I want to ask some question on IRC, I have to use pastebin/dpaste. ( dpaste is developed upon django framework. ). Now, to dpaste any code, I have to switch to Firefox, I have to use mouse as well. I have to copy paste the link to xchat. This was tedious task for me. So, I started making a plugin for xchat so that I could easily paste my code. Fortunately XChat has python plugin interface.

This plugin runs with the command:
/dpaste language
If you keep empty, it will assume it to be “Plain”. You can use any language supported by dpaste.com. The command will open a gtk window, in which you can paste your code. And then “dpaste” button will copy paste the link (containing your code) on your xchat input box. . As of now I am sure, it works fine in IITK proxy system. I am pretty much sure it will work fine if you are behind no proxy.

Before using the proxy, you will need to change few parameters in the script, namely “proxy_username”, “proxy_password”, “proxy_server”, “proxy_port”. If you are not behind proxy, just keep “proxy_server” empty.

Also, you should install python module “ClientForm”, “pygtk”, and “urllib2″.
aptitude install python-clientform python python-gtk2
To load the script, a simple way is /load . Or you can copy the script in ~/.xchat2 folder. That way the script will be loaded whenever you open xchat.

You can download the code from here. As of now I haven’t made docs, but its an easy plugin, and some commenting as well.

Updates : Download the plugin version 0.6, and you don’t need to change anything in it. The plugin uses xchat proxy settings by itself. As of now, http proxy and no proxy is supported.
http://rohitj.net/myscripts/xchat_plugin_dpaste

Must Attend in FOSSKriti

admin — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:21:41 +0000

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.

GIMP Workshop

admin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 10:21:43 +0000

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

2007, you were great. 2008, I hope best from you too

admin — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:44:49 +0000

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:

Got a job at Microsoft, India. I am excited about it.
Got involved into Free Culture activities.
Shifted 99% to open source softwares. (flash )
Shifted 100% to free songs. (though, this is true.)
Shifted to wonderful KDE. I will write an entry for it.
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. )
Hiking
Another hobby now is Photography …. need money to buy DSLR.
Bought a new web space to play with different things. Its been wonderful till now.
Zeropage removed restrictions from their songs.
Kelly Allyn sent me her autograph, need to go home to get it.
Met some wonderful people during internship at Virginia Tech.
<compressed because its personal>

Hopes from 2008 :

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