Being a netizen, its a long time ambition for me to be self sufficient to run the basic online services needed. Basic services for me on internet include:

• Mail
• Website / Blog
• Storage / Data Sync
• Contacts
• Calender
• IM

Earlier, these were distributed over multiple providers, but now mostly revolves around Google. GMail for Mail, Google Analytics in Websites, Google drive for cloud storage, again Google Contacts, GTalk/Hangouts, Google+, etc. So, its also an effort to get out of Google services with minimum effect on usability.

We @ DayScholars finally managed to arrange a good PC to setup as a centralized server for our code and databases. The server is running a customized Debian Squeeze distribution with MySQL Version 5.1. So the next requirement is to allow MySQL access for all of us. This is how we managed it. You must login as root user or must have root privilege to do this.

Edit the MySQL configuration file, located at /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

We prefer using vim. You can use any others like nano or even gedit.

If you’ve never used GNU/Linux before and have always opted for Windows, then you’re missing out big time. GNU/Linux is not only free, but it’s actually a far superior series of operating systems in many ways. Read on to learn about why this open-source approach is going to benefit you as a user of a computer.

Firstly, aren’t you tired of paying hand-over-fist for the latest operating system, only to realise that it’s full of bugs, slow, infested with bloatware and just generally not worth the money? Me too, and that’s one of the reasons GNU/Linux really is a demonstration of just how good an operating system can be despite its lack of a price tag.

This isn’t a hard-to-install OS, either – whether you’re a programmer or a poker.de player, all you need to do is know how to burn files to a disc. After that, it’s just a case of using that disc to install your new operating system. Presently, most GNU/Linux distributions support installations from USB drives too.

The best thing about GNU/Linux is the considerable choice you get, when it comes to your operating system. Believe it or not, it’s not just “Linux” – there are many different operating systems built using the foundations GNU and Linux has set down. Ubuntu is quite a common variation on the Linux theme – a friendly, easy-to-use method of doing anything from playing games to writing a novel.

Of course, GNU/Linux is also extremely fast – there’s no pre-installed bloatware to slow down your computer, and it makes optimum use of your system’s hardware capabilities. It’s really difficult to fault it for what it does, and even if it cost just as much as Windows you’d be hard-pressed to criticse the fact that all the software for it is – you guessed it – also free. GNU/Linux is an incredible boost to anyone tired of the current operating system market, so dig in and find your own computing happiness.

I personally use Debian in my Laptop and servers, but for newbies, I recommend Linux Mint

The second dev camp organized jointly by SMC, ZYXWARE, MES-FSUG and S@IT was conducted today @ MESCE.

The participation was low, around 15, but I would consider it as a successful event as all those who came were really interested. The dev camp 2 started by 10AM. Jishnu welcomed all to the event. Baiju and Sooraj Kenoth introduced themselves. We all introduced ourselves too. I was surprised to hear that Baiju, who initiated the work of SMC was from civil engineering background. This shows that interest is what all matters.

We started off with how to contribute to a project in the basic level, such as bug reporting. Baiju explained about the bug reporting and tracking process and what happens within the developer community when a new bug was reported. We took the example of bugzilla at kde on how to report a bug. Sruthi Devi from GEC Thrissur, shared her experience with it as she had resolved bugs of kstars, a planetarium application of KDE. Even though I have reported bugs to Debian and few other projects earlier, the session gave me more ideas on how to report bug in a more descriptive manner and to follow up with it.

Then we moved on to resolving bugs. Sruthi and Baiju introduced tools like indent, diff and patch, and their working. Indent was new to me and someday I’ll give that a try.

Then we moved our discussion on to version control systems. We had a small overview of cvs, svn, bazaar, mercurial and git. We then looked a bit into git and its basic commands and working. After that we took our break for lunch.

The afternoon session was more on to communicating, like IRC mailing lists and bits and bytes of this and that. We had few issues with IRC as for desktop clients, the port is blocked at college and few browser related errors for webchat.

By 4PM, we concluded the camp and had a small discussion about the event and on how to improve. As of me, the morning session was great, but the afternoon wasn’t much productive. I was also busy trying to fix the monitor resolution in Jasir’s Dell Mini and the Tata Photon whiz connection for Musfir, but without success. Need to give them one more try, when I am free.

Thanks to Sooraj for organizing such an event and Baiju for spending his time with us. Special thanks to Sruti Devi for coming to MESCE and changing the minds of few here on what they could do… 🙂 Special thanks to Raju sir and staff of IT department at MESCE for giving us all the support to host such a camp.

I have clicked few pics. Will add it here soon.
Few pics I clicked are below.

Well, I am writing this at midnight, and almost sleepy. Publishing it now. Will add the links tomorrow. Also, the “h” key of my laptop has got some problems. So, I might have missed “h” within the post.

Here are few other links related to the event:

• http://wiki.smc.org.in/Developer_Camp/MES
• http://it.mesce.ac.in/wiki/index.php/Developer_Camp

Atlast, today I got the opertunity to deliver my seminar, which was part of 7th semester B-Tech syllabus. I was among the last few who couldn’t present on the sheduled time. My proposed date was Dec 2, 2010; the day of MESTECH ’10.

Unlike most of my classmates, I love to deliver talks or seminars, in front of audience, even if less in number. But this time only 2 lecturers were present and that too just to evaluate 🙁

The seminar was on Python is Scientific Computing, based on a paper by Travis E Oliphant.

Here goes the slide and its tex source. The presentation uses progressbar beamer theme by Sylvain Bouveret modified by my friend Jishnu.

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Modified on Jan 6 2011: Jishnu threatned me for violating GPL license as I forgot to give credits. Added that 😀