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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

If you are under a proxy server, and want to access net using http or ftp through Konsole/Terminal, you will need to export http_proxy/ftp_proxy variables. One simple way to do so is that you type the following 2 commands :

$export http_proxy="http://username:password@proxyserver:proxyport"
$export ftp_proxy="http://username:password@proxyserver:proxyport"

You will need to replace “username”, “password”, “proxyserver” and “proxyport” with appropriate values.

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.

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, 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”.

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 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.