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recent reads…

Have been reading a lot lately. Books, for now,  seem to be a good distraction from the outside world and coupled with a cup of tea ( with infinite refills ), you wouldn’t know where the hours went!

Most recently, wrapped up Can love happen twice? I just couldn’t stay away from this one, especially having read, and loved, I Too Had A Love Story by the same author.

This one didn’t prove to be as good a read as the first one.  The book leaves you with mixed emotions. Besides, unfortunately, I did read Almost Single. This one was in the pipeline for months before I got my hands onto it. It was an ordeal going through this book. If only I could remember the person who’d recommended it to me!

But the real delight was A Prisoner of Birth. Thoroughly enjoyed it, cover to cover! :) One of my best reads ever! In the near future I’ll be reading a lot more of Jeffrey Archer.

Informal meetup of Fedora contributors in Bangalore

 A bunch of Fedora volunteers and contributors have decided to meetup this Saturday, i.e. the 14th Jan’12 at the Forum Food Court in Koramangala at 11 a.m. IST .

It is open to one and all and people would be more than happy to see you turn up! Also, if you need Fedora ISOs or any other help, do come ( with a USB stick perhaps ). Hopefully, people would be able to help you out!

Test post.

Testing out my ‘tagged-posts’ RSS settings. If this post lands up on any of the Planets, they don’t work. :/ 

FUDCon, Pune ‘11: Day 2

Day 2

Day 2 began with Harish Pillay delivering the keynote. A number of sessions began thereafter, very much like the previous day. I went to the session ‘Creating Web Apps using Django’ which was taken by Arun SAG. Using a simple blogging web-app, Arun demonstrated how a web application is written using Django. He also shared some useful self-helps and other resources with the participants. The Django Book was one on which both him and rtnpro, who was assisting Arun at times, emphasized on.

Continuing from where Arun left off, it was time for rtnpro to show the participants how to test your django app, the one which they had just created. Speaking about the importance of testing and writing test cases during the development of a software, Ratnadeep ( rtnpro) explained how he had himself benefited by doing so and how he implements testing as a part of his current work at Indifex.

Then, I moved into the auditorium, primarily in search of a stable internet connection as the one in the Seminar Hall during the Django sessions was unreliable. Paresh Mutha gave an ‘Introduction to Spacewalk’. Spacewalk is an open source Linux and Solaris systems management solution. Quoting,

“It allows you to :
- Install and update software on your systems
- Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
- Provision (Kickstart) your systems
- Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
- Monitor your systems “

Later, Amit Shah spoke about the latest developments in Linux Virtualization, which was followed by Kashyap Chamarthy digging into Virtualization with Libvirt. Then, Jared Smith gave his talk on Writing Technical Documentation with DocBook and Publican. Jared explained that writing code was not the only way people could contribute, there exist a number of other ways, one being writing technical documentation. Taking Kushal’s book Python For You & Me as an example he demonstrated the usage of Publican and DocBook.

Rahul Sundaram then discussed Ask Fedora, its use, the efforts put in by the community, present status and future plans. Ask Fedora is a community knowledge base and support forum for the Fedora community where people can ask any questions related to Fedora. Ask Fedora is now active and can be accessed here. Read the release announcement and click here if you wish to know more get involved.

Later that night, the whole community and the volunteers for the event got together at FUDPub and had a gala time with drinks and good food.

My post on FUCon, Pune ‘11 : Day 1 

FUDCon, Pune ‘11: Day 1

Fedora Users and Developers Conference, FUDCon, was held in Pune, India from 4-6th of Nov. ‘11. The event website is here. For more updates on the event’s progress, check out the twitter stream.

Day 1

The event was inaugurated by Dr. Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, the Director of College of Engineering, Pune (CoEP), the venue for the event, who applauded the effort put in by everyone to make the event possible and wished for it’s success. Then, it was time for Jared Smith, the Fedora Project Leader (FPL) to deliver the keynote for the day. He spoke about Fedora, the 4Fs, and his vision/goals for the future. Relating software development to the upstream-downstream flow of a river, he urged people to do take the first step. 

After the keynote, a number of sessions began in various rooms. See the full schedule here. First, I went to hear rtnpro speak about Transifex. Transifex is an open service allowing people to collaboratively translate software, documentation and other types of projects. Describing Transifex’s structure in brief, he spoke about how he began contributing to the project less than a year ago and ultimately got hired full-time a few months back. He told the audience, mostly students, about how they could start contributing to the project. A number of them seemed quite interested too. Lets see if something, rather, somebody, from the flock turns up for the better. 

Thereafter, I went to the ‘Fedora Web of Trusts’ session where Heherson Pagcaliwagan was verifying and signing GPG Keys and also helping people without one to setup theirs. Next up, I went to see Vaidik Kapoor demo-ing usage of COD, a Conference Organization Distribution, which was used to make the website of FUDCon, Pune. COD is based on Drupal. He showed how one could make a website for organizing an event/conference easily and customize it as per the need. 

After Vaidik, Soumya gave people some ’ Insight of tracing on Linux Systems’. He spoke about a few tools using which people could monitor the performance of an application, their system, etc. He seemed quite fond of LTTng in particular. 

After the sessions for the day were done with, it was time for the community to interact, meeting some of the people they had known all along only by their IRC Nicks or email-ids till now and making new friends. ;-) 

See you there! ;)