Hackfest @ Directi #1 – 31st January, 2010

It all started with this, when Manish DM'd me for a small hackfest. We were looking for a small space where we could sit together, access internet and write some code for straight 5-6 hrs. Thanks to folks at Directi and @codechef, we no longer have to wander / crib about it.

Here is a late recollection of the first event -

This time 4 of us could make it - Manish, Rohan, Ishan and I. We were joined by Mr. Sandeep and Naresh from Directi. Though the initial plan had 9 people, many couldn't make it due to exams, other personal commitments, etc

Ishan's talk was pretty in-depth and eye-opening for any Computer Science student. I think we should've recorded it. The talk dealt with problems that Geolocation based Search faces these days and his focussed on Geolocation disambiguation. He discussed some ways to solve it, ways to store and query your data efficiently (tries, ternary trees), ways to quickly find nearby places (quadtree decomposition), and even few new algorithms (bloom filter, etc).

It was eye opener in the sense that one could actually see the application of Data Structures and Algorithms apart from the only kind of good exposure we get in our college life - Programming Contests.

Then Manish gave an Introduction to Codeigniter, a popular, powerful yet simple mvc framework written in PHP. Though this was meant to be an intro, it actually went in-depth and all of us who had merely tried out Codeigniter once in a while came to know about even more features that it has. The discussion extended to various other issues pertaining to mysql, php, unit testing, etc

It was 2pm already and we were quite hungry by then. Rohan also wanted to give a short talk on his own project on centralized authentication, but we couldn't schedule that along with lunch and work to be done.

By 4pm after lunch the headcount was 3 - Rohan, Manish and I. We started working on apt-offline, in order to make a gui for it in PyQt4. I gave a quick walk-through to what apt-offline does, what it is built upon, and how to use it. Then we saw the code in order to figure out best way to proceed with the task. Manish drew some mockups and discussed on how to make the ui more user friendly and he actually KISSified the current UI into something much straightforward and easy to use.

So far we started designing the new looks in QT Designer, while Rohan shared his in-depth knowledge on Qt (C++) time to time.

http://img688.yfrog.com/i/mainscreensample.png/
http://img718.yfrog.com/i/mainscreensamplemenu.png/

As it was 8:30pm already and everyone had college or office to attend to on Monday, we had to leave by then. But boy we wished to stay more.

I think as even folks at Directi suggested, a Saturday would be better time to organize the next hackfest. A night-out is pretty much possible on Saturday as it does take time start working along with everyone on a project.

Last but not the least, the Directi office is a perfect hangout for such weekend coding and geek get-togethers. While meetups do happen in Bangalore, but they mostly comprise of talks and discussions, for instance the bangpypers and ilugb meetups. But a hackfest with such great flexibility and freedom is a totally different learning experience.

Here's Manish's detailed account of the day.

The OpenSolaris Meetup

Since the netinst says 6 hrs remaining, I have enough time to kill...

Yesterday I was at the OpenSolaris meetup at TW. There were supposed to be three topics of discussion - DTrace, ZFS and Zones. These are some of the really cool things one can talk of when talking about OpenSolaris. By end of first two there was hardly any time left to go on. And neither I had much capacity left out.

This time I saw a few more familiar faces. It was surprising to find Santhu from IITM, sitting just behind me for the DTrace session. I had met him at CodeBreakers (I just loved the prelims and final round questions) at Shaastra 08. I also found some familiar faces from PyCon India 09, made some new friends, etc, etc.

This meetup has left me with a bigger to-try-out list, which includes -

1. [ ] Trying out DTrace. Do that uname -a hack on it so that the user thinks he is on Ubuntu while running BeleniX :)
2. [ ] use DTrace to develop an understanding of what goes behind the scenes. It's an awesome tool that gives you a goldbag of hidden knowledge, will be great for Unix Internals next sem.
   
3. [ ] Would love to tinker with ZFS, manage some stuff, make some space for backups and use snapshots over them.
4. [ ] Understand the difference b/w linux and unix. Yes! I had a very very tough time today morning with OpenSolaris.
5. [ ] Play around with Evince's code to solve the small usability glitch I found out. More over use stow as suggested by rrs to build it rather than breaking my system as I did yesterday.
6. [ ] Checkout Alioth (looks cool), maybe put gtweetbar over it.
7. [ ] KDE. Yeah, have to, I found KDE 3.5.x that runs on BeleniX 0.7.1 to be giving decent performance.
8. [ ] Figure out how the hell to get networking done on BeleniX - wired and wireless. To my disappointment as for today morning's attempt. dladm show-link shows nothing :( Even /usr/bin/inetmenu isn't present, so I can't procede the n00b way. But I have to show some patience to it, read some more and come back.

Btw, its pretty cool to know that in ZFS you don't need any formatting, it builds up as you use it! And there was another point where Moinak discussed about how the scheduling algo places related things nearby so that the disk head doesn't have to move a lot. I could relate that to OS course we had last semester. I definitely plan to take up Unix Internals next semester. I hope they don't cancel it. You'll notice a 'Bheria Dhasaan' (crowd induced decisions) at my college when it comes to course selection. Many people tend to decide what they choose on three factors -

• Where's majority heading to?
• What is easy?
• Which one's got the teacher I know/heard of?

What about the subject itself ??? Maybe I should start influencing some people to build a recognizable Unix Internals gang.

After the meetup I was walking around Koramangala with Navin, who was very happy to hand me a CD of OpenSolaris and NetBeans. I'm still not an IDE guy. He also talked about OSUM, etc, and asked me if I could start a group at my college, but how do I explain that I goto a college which bans use of personal computing equipments (laptops) for 2 years of the 4 year engineering course. How would I find a suitable audience there?? Its a place where a guy asked this to my friend who was using Ubuntu - "Is this genuine, did you purchase it or got it pirated?" (that's true, I'm not exaggerating). Its a place where they keep you busy-tied with their awesome course plans and irrelevant courses.

So, if I do form any such group, there might be hardly any output apart from a very few getting an understanding of the things. The sole purpose of forming such group would drill down to self promotion instead of intelligent discussion, getting some Certificate from Sun and goodies, which I do not want and which is not the _way_. There must be some better purpose behind my actions. After all being in third year, your audience are going to be 1st and 2nd year students who don't have a laptop to try anything you've talked about. Correct me if I'm being too negative.

I still don't buy that "everything runs on java" or "sab kuch aajkal java pe hi to chalta hai" thing some people point-out around me, have heard it from a java guy and another mate who thinks that he knows. "Chalta hai to chalta hoga, main apna ghar to apni marzi se chalaunga", atleast I've not run a Java Applet since 6 months, I'm sure about it, the enterprise scene might be different. Besides as a student who wants to play around and actually use his computer to do cool things, why would I waste writing 100 lines of java, where I could do same or more in 20 lines of Python, getting input from user in 3 lines where I could do it in one raw_input(). And again if such baseless rumours drive what you plan to learn, then what's the fun?

That also reminds me of Digambar from NTRO internship - "Poora duniya Oraccle pe hi chalta hai.", notice the extra 'c'. And his machine gun of baseless arguments supporting Oracle the moment 'MySql' came out of my mouth. His love for ASP.NET, the moment 'PHP' came out of my mouth.

I installed OpenSolaris 2009.06 from that live cd today. It worked, bootup time was little high, no problem. Got proper resolution, a polished gnome (Ubuntu 9.10 is more polished) and was again stuck on how to get wireless working, before I could get the windows XP drivers to be used with ndiswrapper, I rebooted and osol failed to start X... I located gdm (which gdm), rant it and was presented with this - "Can't locate /export/$HOME" etc... Something had gone wrong without reasons! My /export was empty. Felt pointless investigating it and threw in the BeleniX liveCD.

Some more observation on it - whenever I restart it from KDE, instead of a restart I get dropped to CLI login screen with a warning message that kdm could not execute reboot. I wonder if its a user priviledge issue...

4 hr 56 minutes more to the Debian netinst. This time I've selected KDE as default desktop on it. Will fetch gnome later, need that to work upon gTweetBar and Evince.

I tried finding some presentations from the meet, here is a huge list -http://opensolaris.org/os/community/advocacy/os-presentations/

ILUG-B meetup #2

Well, it was a pleasant Saturday with 50-cent playing on the auto in which I sped towards TW office - for ilug-b meet. This one was a total gyan session and even though there was even more OHP than last time, I'm glad that I pulled up till the end. After all I can definitely say BeleniX and ZFS are the next two things on my tryout list. Ram's presentation was awesome and in the end we got to see some seriously cool stuff people made through Virtualization and Crossbow on Solaris. Hats off to the $350 magic box guys!
And, oh the discussion over GPG finally ended I suppose! Finally when things were light under beer, I could observe some less OHP... 4chan, LOLcat, Mitnick, first-time-on-linux and what not. I guess I've had my usual amount of beer that invites me for a nice sleep. Even mom has guessed it as she puts it "ette der katte lagalao? daru peeke elhi yay ki...?" damn! How do I respond to that :P

Afterthoughts -

• Linux is more about loving the OS, than just being an enthusiastic user...
• Determination is even more important as pg puts it.