Today, I thought deeply of managing web designing as a part time job. The main thing what I lack is support. Parents don’t like me spending lot of time with computer and Internet and they says that I am wasting lot of my time with computer. If I get someone with ideas like mine, it won’t take long for me to start web designing as a part time job… With my more than 5 years experience with the web and its technologies and services, I think I have got enough exposure with the field.

Another field is that of free software. I hope that the GNU Lab project at college will be helpful in gaining exposure in that field too.

Modems are the major help for villagers to access net, since broadband connections haven’t reached much of the villages. And for Linux users, configuring a modem, which is originally designed for Windows(Winmodem) still stands like a giant wall.

Many of the modem manufactures are providing binary files of the drivers for Linux with the driver CD. Even though for a new user, its hard to compile, experienced  persons could help in configuring it. But, take the case of Conexant, one among the leading Modem Chipset manufactures. Usually, with every piece of hardware we purchase, we also get the drivers needed for working with it. But, Conexant isn’t providing drivers for Linux with the driver CD. Its ok. May be Linux is now growing up and many hardware vendors don’t provide drivers for Linux in the driver CD, but it can be downloaded from net for free. So, when we search for its drivers, what we will come across is a site named Linuxant, who provide Linux drivers for Conexant chipsets. But, the free drivers they provide is somewhat like a trial version, which supports just 14.4Kbps, while the modem can support upto 52Kbps. It means, with it, we can use the modem in Linux, but maximum speed is limited to just above 2KB per second…

Another funny thing is that they are providing full drivers for 20US$. The modem costs below INR 300(around 7US$) and for the driver we need to pay extra money, which is thrice the cost of  modem.

This is a fact to think about. Why is a company like Conexant behaving so to Linux?

I tried in every way to achieve the full speed, like what we usually do with softwares in Windows, but it doesn’t work. I even managed to make the driver say its full version, but still by calculating the data transfer rate, the speed is the old 14.4Kbps. Has anyone found any way to manage through this? If so, please help me…

The profusehost server where most part of my sites are hosted was down for more than two days due to some maintainance works. It was the longest down time, I ever had with profusehost and its ok now. As per the administrator of Profuse Community, the downtime lasted only for a small time, and the downtime that we had was due to the DNS errors. As per the WebCEO monitoring of my site, the estimated downtime was 56h 5min 28sec. But still, I recommend profusehost for free hosting.

I came across this site http://www.shutdownday.org/ and was interested by the idea of shutting down the computer for 24 hours continuously. Though its has not much impact on common people, it has great impact on professionals. Just think what all a computer professional can do, with his computer shut down for 24 hours…! And also, how much energy can be saved…! So, I am gonna promote it. Placed a small ad in my site and changed my status message in IM’s.

If you are interested in the idea, check out the site and participate in the survey…

I was thinking about writing about the workshop and I wrote a bit about it. Then, I saw Shyam’s mail and he has written a report much better than mine. So, I am posting it here(with a little bit formatting and editing) instead of mine…

We started the inaugural ceremony by 10:00am. Raju sir started by welcoming all to the workshop. Col.Induchudan sir, HOD of IT department was our chief guest. He did the formal inauguration of the workshop. Later Raju sir invited Jinesh to give an introduction about the workshop. Jinesh briefly explained what the workshop is all about. He started the workshop with an introduction and then handed over to me, to take an introductory session on how Malayalam is handled on computer(the user level things) and some very basics about Unicode.

The previous day, We a team of free software fans[FSFs?], including Mahesh, and first year CSE guys Manu, Krishna Raj, Vishnu, Savanan and myself was in the lab till 7:00-7:30pm installing the Malayalam locale, and the essential softwares in all computers. Thanks to the teachers at IT lab, they have been so helpful in setting that up. We saw, how interesting it would be if we could team up and hack every night in the lab… It was a new joy for us.

So with those installations, it was very easy for me to show the participants how it worked. But those are just user level hacks, every man with some common sense could study himself, with some time. We did that to show the students who are yet to start, that these things are so easy and its there for making our life easier:-). We showed them, the default inscript method of inputing Malayalam, the difference between lalitha and the usual keymap. Swanalekha was shown and finally ended up with tuxtype.

After this introduction the workshop changed to its second phase, explaining what we can do in this area as Engineers. How we can make a career around language technology, what all are oppurtunities around language technology that usually are not taken seriously while considering our career options. He explained about what
localisation(l10n) and internationalisation(i18n) is all about and the community efforts in this area.

There were some time left after Jinesh’s workshop, so I took a brief session on IRC. Which is one of the must-know kind of thing for an engineering student. Where almost every free software projects are discussed and where we get quality help, provided we behave well;-) [To add a lill thing to that- People, I am alone at our home #mes-fsf;-). So while being online, just try to be there at #mes-fsf. Its as easy as clicking this link and clicking connect there]

The workshop ended with the valedictory function which was chaired by our Director, Dr. K.P Mohammed sir. He wished all the best for our ventures and said that the idea to make use of the lunch time is good.

Thus the second activity of GNU Labs got to an end successfully. Raghesh sir’s and Raju sir’s strong support is what enables us to cover our disabilities and shortcomings in organising such functions and we will try to improve through activities.

Special thanks to all who attended and we hope, you people become active in the near future, that we together can move to more meaningfull activities than mere workshops like, if you people got interested in localisation, we can very well start a localisation group and start localising KDE who’s Malayalam status is quite low. Remember, you just wanna know Malayalam and absolutely no programming skill is required, you just want to know, how to edit a text in a computer… believe me!:-)

So we just had a good start and lets together go forward to build a better future.

Shyam’s original report can be found here. He just forgot to tell about the code of Swanalekha, which was very interesting to read with the comments in Malayalam. Its a good example on how to make code interesting to read.