Its strike again… Now its for taking back some students who were suspended for some enquiry reasons. No one was allowed to enter the college and we were all in the hostel near by, named “Cuba”. Its the first time, our exams were not cancelled(Hope so as none attended).

Though there were plans to go for a film, we abandoned it and went to the river side. There were more than 6 from our classs and we enjoyed walking through the sand. We also got range for DD News in Aalok’s China made phone…:-)

Today was the Vishu, one which we keralites celebrate as the new year. For this Vishu, there weren’t any celebrations as my brother is suffering from chicken-pox. Another reason is that my series exams starts tomorrow. The only good thing that happened was that I got a vishukaineetam of RS 200… May be I could recharge for GPRS with it.

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.

Today was the college sports day. Since the series exams are near, most have gone home and hence the participation was less. I went to the college to attend the mechanical workshop scheduled in the afternoon section, but I was disappointed to hear that there was no workshop today. Its not because of my fond for mechanical workshop; its because I am one section behind everyone, due to some leaves. So, I and Krishnaraj went to help Shyam and Mahesh to configure the systems for tomorrow’s workshop related to localization of softwares and its importance, organized by the GNU Lab @ MESCE. The workshop is conducted by Jinesh K, a former student of MESCE. The exact topic is “Opportunities and challenges of Localization/Internationalization in Personal Computing”. We installed Malayalam locales and some softwares related to Malayalam developed by SMC.

I have been wondering how to install Malayalam language in Debian and enabling the menus in Malayalam. Today, I came to know how to do it and much more regarding mounting drives, network drives, apt-get, Synaptic Package manager, .sh extension files, etc. The lab chosen for the workshop was the Multi-Core computing lab of IT department and most of the systems have Debian installed. Also, the staff in the lab helped us a lot by installing Debian in the systems which don’t have it and in mounting the drives and placing our files in server.

We were in the lab till around 8 O’ clock. Vishnu and Savanan from S1S2 CSE-B also came to help us.

I reached NIT by 8PM on 4th along with Shyam & Krishnaraj, my college mates and Hiran. Hiran was one among the speakers and his talk was regarding font designing. After dinner we attended two talks. Since we were a bit late, we couldn’t attend the inauguration ceremony. Those who attended told that it was great, but there were rumors that the chief guest came for some other function and was asked to inaugurate FOSS meet. One among the speakers mentioned about that during his talk.

For the easiness to express what I felt about the talks I attended, I’ll be using ‘+’ for the positive side and ‘-‘ for the negative side.

The first talk was by Deepak R, one of the lecturer from NITC itself. His talk was about Octave and Maxima, which are alternatives for MATLAB. I couldn’t compare Octave and MATLAB because I haven’t used both of them. Now, about his talk:
+ Help full in acquiring a introductory idea about Octave and Maxima and what it can do.
+ Familiarized a few commands and the format of them.
– Felt as if he was not much prepared as he couldn’t clear the doubts from audience.
– Didn’t went deep to the software(I heard that Octave can do much more than just drawing graphs and making mathematical calculations)

The next talk was about Blogging and Publicity by Kiruba Shankar. He was a speaker last year too. His talk made me think about my identity in the net. Among the talks which I attended, it was the one with highest number of audience.
+ Was very interactive with the audience and encouraging (was running here and there among the audience during the talk).
+ Used his personal experience and examples well.
+ Gave the idea to preserve our identity in net.
– Just elaborated the ideas from the audience and there weren’t much to the ides from his part
I felt it funny that he told us to promote ourselves(means our blog and sites), but was wearing a T-shirt with Yahoo’s emblem. I also doubt that he gave away the chocolates that he offered for those who asked doubts. 🙂

There were confusion regarding the accommodation facilities and at last we(Me, Shyam and Krishnaraj) were admitted to PG1 hostel. I heard from those who were present in the last year’s FOSS meet that the organization of that meet was much better than this. Till 2AM, we talked to each other and watched few videos related to free software in Shyam’s laptop. He also gave us an introduction to E-Macs.

On 5th, the talks started by 9.30. There were two parallel streams. So, I missed Hiran’s talk as I preferred to attend the talk on OpenID by Praveen A. OpenID means the technique of using a single username and password over the net.
+ The topic was new to most of the audience, including me.
– The doubt about the idea of topic was there for a long time as all were using the conventional usename and password methods.
There were few problems related to the internet connection, which hindered the flow of talk.

There was a parallel session by Pramode sir in the lab for school students related to free software and python programming. We went to attend that too. We were surprised on looking at the schedule list which was there in our kit. It contained Shyam’s name for a project discussion about his GSoC project on speech recognition, “Sarika”. He said that he hasn’t done much on his project for the last two months. After seeing that, he was busy preparing slides and all. Mean while, I met Anivar, Praveen, Ani Peter, Baiju, Santhosh, Praveen Prakash, Mobin and others. Ani Peter was distributing the stickers related to GNOME and OpenOffice. I also got a GPLV3 badge from Anivar. Hiran was showing everyone a 4GB pen drive(Kunnamkulam made), which he bought just for RS 350. Krishnaraj was sad on hearing that as he bought a 2GB one for RS 650.

I also attended the session by Pavithran on “KDE for educational applications”. I couldn’t say much about it as I attended it for a few minutes only. Anyway, there was a confusion with the language as most of the audience were the school students and Praveen was translating the talk to Malayalam.

The next talk by Niyam Bhushan on Interface design was also interesting. He stated with examples that most of the softwares and gadgets were successfull due to its interface design. He also suggested few sites which will be helpful for interface design and showed one of his work. There was a little confusion for him to use the KDE desktop environment in Opensuse as the projector was not responding to his Ubuntu Studio system. He also complained that the interface is horrible.
+ Good interaction with the audience.

Later, I attended as a listener of the meeting of SMC members on creating and registering a society. More than 10 members were present in the meeting. We planned to leave in the evening as I have some works and Shyam have his university exam on Monday. But, since shyam’s project discussion was scheduled around 5.30, he couldn’t come along with me. I left NIT by 5.45PM and reached back home by 9.30PM

The FOSS meet was a new experience for me as it was for the first time I am attending such a meet. The organization of the meet was not as better as I hoped and the participation was less(May be its due to the Calicut university exams going on). I hope more details on the meet can be seen at www.fossmeet.in/nitc/ soon.

Update:

Check out more details from…

• Pramode sir
• Hiran
• tuxmaniac
• Sarath Lakshman
• Kishore