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.

Now then summer is coming, I think I will again be exploring various distros. Any suggestions?

Update : Oh, the issue with upgrading is that there are chances of things breaking. For example, when I upgraded to Jaunty, my knetworkmanager was gone. So, I had to use LAN and install it. fglrx drivers are not installed. And stuff like that.

But this way, you will see your password as well. And if you are with your friends, they can see the password as well. To solve this problem, you can use this small script. In “/etc/bash.bashrc” append these lines :

function proxy(){
echo -n "username :"
read -e username
echo -n "password :"
read -es password
export http_proxy="http://$username:$password@proxyserver:proxyport/"
export ftp_proxy="http://$username:$password@proxyserver:proxyport/"
echo -e "\nProxy variables set."
}

You will need to replace “proxyserver” and “proxyport” with appropriate values. Thats it. Now whenever you need to export the variables, just type “proxy” and press enter. It will ask you for your username and passwd. And will do the rest by itself.

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.

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.


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.

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

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.