I had been on a weekend trip to Wai and Mahabaleshwar, Maharashtra, India. More photos in my /gallery.

I had conducted a one-day introductory workshop on Fedora at Foresight Institute of Management and Research, affiliated to University of Pune, Maharashtra, India on Saturday, December 3, 2011.

I started the day’s proceedings with an introduction to free/open source software. Most of the students who participated were studying towards their bachelor’s programme in computer applications (BCA), and were familiar with C, C++ and Java development. I gave a demo of the Fedora desktop, and also showed them the plethora of software that they can use.

I also introduced them to revision control with examples on using git. I also addressed the various communication tools that we use, the basic communication guidelines, and the Fedora sub-projects that they can participate in.

During the post-lunch session, I explained to them about copyright, trademarks, and licensing, and how to use them. I explained the basic concepts in installation, and gave them a demo of installation of Fedora. I have given them CD/DVD images of both Fedora 15 and 16.

Thanks to Antriksh Shah for working with me for a month in organizing this workshop.

Shakthimaan’s tweets are now available for reference at http://www.shakthimaan.com/links/tweets.html. I use identi.ca and twitter for documentation links, book references, and useful tips. I am now making it available for others as well. You can also get the sources at:

~~~~ {.shell} $ git clone git://gitorious.org/shakthimaan-tweets/mainline.git
~~~~

I use the following code in .emacs with Emacs ERC to get notified using notify-send whenever anyone pings me on IRC:

~~~~ {.lisp} (defun erc-global-notify (matched-type nick msg) (interactive) (when (eq matched-type ’current-nick) (shell-command (concat “notify-send -t 8000 -c "im.received" "” (car (split-string nick “!”)) " mentioned your nick" "" msg “"”)))) (add-hook ’erc-text-matched-hook ’erc-global-notify) ~~~~

As part of the FUDCon Pune 2011 organizing team, I had volunteered to help with design work. After attending few training sessions on Inkscape by Máirín Duffy, I decided to give it a try. Ian Weller had written a Python script to create name badges with Inkscape. It would read list of names from a comma separated file (csv) file, and would generate pdfs from the design provided in the svg file. I had customized the script with help from Dave Malcolm, created csv files for speakers, volunteers and registered delegates, and generated over 400 named badges for the FUDCon event.

Thanks to Kushal Das for the photograph.

Badges printed on green paper would be for volunteers and organizers, while those printed on blue paper were for speakers. Everyone else got their names printed on white paper. We had also printed badges with just the FUDCon Pune logo for people who register at the venue to write their names on it. We decided not to use QR codes. If we had data on the delegates such as t-shirt size, food preference, identi.ca/twitter feed, IRC nick names, we could have printed them on the badge as well. I did leave enough white space, so people could write whatever they want. The scripts, the Inkscape svg design, an example csv and sample pdf generated are available at http://shakthimaan.fedorapeople.org/docs/fudcon. I had also designed the coupons for lunch, day I and II, and for the FUDPub:

As a follow-up to my talk on QUCS on day II of FUDCon Pune 2011, I wanted to create circuit examples on the final day from a text book that was being followed for basic electrical engineering course work. This would be a supplement that a student can use when learning circuit theory. Anuj More and Payas Awadhutkar joined in, and we worked on schematics from chapter I of ‘Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering’ by Leonard S. Boborow, a.k.a “Babu Rao” in India. The schematics were created in qucs-0.0.16, and are available from Payas Awadhutkar gitorious repo:

$ git clone git://gitorious.org/qucs-baburao/qucs-baburao.git

As a finale to the event, Jared Smith cut the Fedora cake!

I would like to thank all the volunteers from College of Engineering, Pune and Prof. Abhijit A M who coordinated with us in organizing this conference. Thanks also goes to the Fedora contributors who helped in getting things done. Special thanks to Red Hat for sponsoring the event, and for their wonderful support. The COEP volunteers:

We trained many students over the years as part of the Fedora project. I was very happy to see them as speakers and present on the things that they have been working on, and also help others when required during the conference. This is the best outcome that I take from the event.

All the photos taken at FUDCon Pune 2011 are available in my /gallery.

I arrived early again on day II of FUDCon Pune 2011. The day’s proceedings started with a keynote by Harish Pillay on his thoughts on community work, and on his new role as the lead of Community Architecture. I then attended the ‘Security in the Open Source world!’ talk by Eugene Teo and Huzaifa Sidhpurwala. Their talk covered quite a bit on the various security threats, and on how they are handled.

Since I attended the GlusterFS overview talk on the first day, I wanted to follow it up with the ‘GlusterFS: Hacking HOWTO’ talk by Amar Tumballi. He suggested newbies to read on translators as a starting point to work with Gluster, along with few ideas that they could start with. Lunch was again served at 12 noon. After lunch, I headed to Seminar Hall 2 for my talk on ‘Quite Universal Circuit Simulator - A Qt Love Story’ (QUCS). It is an introduction to electrical circuit theory using circuit components as “fictional” men and women. The example circuits were created using qucs-0.0.15. The examples are available at the gitorious repo:

$ git clone git://gitorious.org/qucs-a-qt-love-story/qucs-a-qt-love-story_prj.git

After my talk, I went to the auditorium to attend the talk by Amit Shah on ‘Linux Virtualization’ followed by Kashyap Chamarthy’s talk on ‘Virtualization with Libvirt’. They had given a good overview of virtualization in the Linux kernel, and available tools that one could use. I do use Publican, and thus attended Jared Smith’s talk on the same. Publican does insert blank pages to ensure that new chapters start on the right-hand side if the content were to be printed as a book. For the final talk of the day, I attended Rahul Sundaram’s session on Askbot for Fedora, and the roadmap and features that he is interested in. We then travelled to Hotel Parc Estique for the FUDPub!

I arrived early on day I of FUDCon Pune 2011 to help with the registration desk. We had different counters for speakers and volunteers, and for delegates. A printer was available for us to print badges, directions, or posters as required.

I attended the keynote by Jared Smith, the Fedora Project Leader. The illustrations used in his presentation, ‘Fedora “State of the Union” Address’ were really good. I then proceeded to the classrooms to attend Ramakrishna Reddy’s talk on ‘Developer Survivor Manual’. He addressed essential things that newbie developers need to know, and demoed various revision control systems. Fedora banners were placed at various seminar locations on campus to indicate where the talks and sessions were being held.

Lunch was served at 12 noon, and then I moved on to attend the ‘Fedora Remix and the Community’ talk by Danishka Navin. He shared his experience with the Hanthana project, which is a Fedora remix that has support for Sinhalese, and Tamil and has been deployed at various schools in Sri Lanka. Fedora is one of the first and largest user of gitolite, and I was happy to meet its author, Sitaram Chamarthy, from TCS Innovation Labs, Hyderabad, India. His talk was filled with numerous examples from people using gitolite. The other large users of gitolite are KDE and kernel.org. I then attended the ‘GlusterFS’ talk by Krishna Srinivas from Red Hat, who gave an overview of the Gluster file system, its architecture, and uses.

I had filed a ticket year-end of 2009 to Fedora India to organize a FUDCon in India. We couldn’t make it in 2010, but it is happening this year!

In preparation to FUDCon, Pune 2011, we had organized our second Fedora Activity Day (FAD) at the FOSS Lab, College of Engineering, Pune, India on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Thanks to COEP for hosting the FAD, and to Prof. Abhijit for working with us in organizing the same. Saleem Ansari had setup http://fudcon.in using Conference Organization Distribution, which we used it for registration at the venue.

Prasad Pandit started the day’s proceedings with an introduction to Python. Basic syntax, semantics of Python were covered, and we helped the participants in getting started in writing simple scripts. I then presented an overview of contributing to Fedora using the i-want-2-do-project. tell-me-wat-2-do-fedora presentation, and the various communication channels that they need to be familiar with to work with the larger Fedora community.

We had lunch at the COEP Boat Club canteen. After lunch, Kashyap Chamarthy presented KVM virtualization in Fedora illustrating examples using libvirt and virt tools. Amit Shah and Kashyap answered queries regarding virtualization. Saleem Ansari then presented an introduction to web development and Django, illustrating the use of model, view and template design. I concluded the day’s sessions with an introduction to git using the di-git-ally managing love letters presentation.

Few photos taken at the event are available in my /gallery.