Acedip

Wating under the starry night,
thro’ fieldth of grass and hay,
singing that solitary song,
which long ago a reaper sang.

The first presage of winter is following,
starth are moving faster than i can walk,
I am running from the solitude but can not,
helpless rooted I stare from the midearth,
thro’ the starth where i can reach not.

The old song is following from the meadowth,
across the earth, thro’ the shadowth,
who eclipsed come from the back,
on the track,
on which i sit.

Gone are the months of may,
when we, in arms lay.
in the fields of grass and hay,
where my soule still stays
starth did shine but did not move fast
to watch us–at last.

long gone are the dayth of love
when that old song was sung by none,
but all the starth, all the meadowth,
drown in the solitary tone.

My hearte bleeds for thy love,
No, the aching said,
thine love was lost long ago,
in the vast tar and tor.

still the helpless ignored the solitude,
and went astray with thine lost love,
now, awake thy poore soule,
run, save thy soule, not get lost any more,
in the vast tar and tor…

Anisingh (signed)

#Found it buried somewhere in my book shelves.. Dated May 2004

Like all the best things that ever happen to a man, this too came to me while idling and listening to good old kishore da’s unforgetful melodies and browsing (though not all men browse, internet is young you see :/ ) and suddenly came across something which will never let you disconnect from facebook which most of you are already glued to like in-separable half siblings.

For all you pidign users there is a plugin for pidgin which will let you sign in to your facebook account and sing-in to the facebook chat, and noone would ever know i f you are even really on facebook. Your list of friends will appear just as like any other IM account and under the facebook tag. All thanks to efforts of Eion robb who created the thing in may 2008.

Note: the plugin is available for window and other platforms too, you just need to be a piding user to do this

Well that is not always alright when you have to install from source and that is exactly the thing with the main project site, but when scrolling down to comments you I came across a link which has rpm for fedora here and which has been very nicely maintained since fedora 8

so simply firiing

[Acedip~ #]wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/purple-facebookchat/1.60/1.fc11/i586/purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
 libjson-glib-1.0.so.0 is needed by purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586

oop, what is that!! well seemed like we have to get it, so after a few clicks i got it

[Acedip~ #]wget ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/fedora/releases/11/Everything/i386/os/Packages/json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]# rpm -ivh json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
 1:json-glib              ########################################### [100%]
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
 1:purple-facebookchat    ########################################### [100%]

n the picture, you can also set your facebook status and also get all updates form facebook.

And that is it, done with the install part, now what you gotta do is simply.

• Download and install plugin for your specific platform as below
• Restart Pidgin (or go to Tools->Plugins) to redetect plugins
• Add a new account to Pidgin (Accounts->Manage Accounts->Add)
• Choose “Facebook” from the dropdown list
• Use your Facebook email address in the username field
• Start chatting
• you can also update your facebook status from here, no need to even login to facebook, until and unless you want to try out those freaky quizzes and application which maybe even god may find difficult to comprehend.
  

well this was a short guide to get the plugin work on fedora, a complete documentation of all platforms is available on the main package site.

Finally I sit gazing at my new laptop. I dont think no one has ever spend so much time in getting a new machine, it took me over 4 months to get this one, no!, I’m no weirdo but the situation and more over ones which I liked had larger issues with fedora and once you cant get what you want, you wait, so I waited and here I am finally relieved.

Installation of fedora 11 was quite quick keeping in mind almost all the packages I’d selected to install amounting uptp 1400 of them, and then the system booted, It felt really great on seeing the fedora screen once more in my life (after a short stint with ubuntu because of hardware issues). I choose not to send my hardware profile to smolt until later time and had to do it late with

[Acedip@localhost ~]#smoltSendProfile

and here is my machines hardware profile.

Everything seems fine till now, but I sensed some troubles coming my way as soon as I saw that Broadcom Corporation in my network chips, and there I was struggling over a few late night hours to get my wireless working. I was pretty determined to have it my way and finally after brooding over a couple of web pages and some help from #fedora got the wireless working with this.

Well while fixing it i noticed that the above link would largely satisfy all broadcom wireless needs but this one really helped in knowing about broadcom chips here but this can only satisfy your hungry mind and not actually help you with the issue and I also got to know that there is an IRC channel for broadcom BCMxxxx users at freenode: #bcm-users, though its always better to do your homework before you go to that channel.

Though I still have some minor issues like battery tray icon often doesnt give right readings, but it has to be fixed ASAP, and the default brightness controller keys does not work properly either.

Well the pictures are fine looking at the output from sony ericsson k530i.

The sound of the machine is pretty awesome with two speaker built in the screen. Later I installed Gnash for playing flash, comix for viewing pictures in archives and as the name signifies to view comics, and did other usual stuff to get my machine up to date with all non-free codecs etc. and when I checked for update I was again astonished to see 900Mbs of yum update, woof!!

What are you running from? what is everyone running from, or are they running towards something, do they know that for sure, I doubt that. Then why so much running for nothing, I can understand when people like bollywood biggies and ambanis run for a cause, though that too is not much of a reason but atleast that is what we all like to buy, dont we. When was the last time one did something just for the mere kicks out of it, when did we wander in the wilderness for no *logical* reason at all. When was it when we threw all mediums of communication and sat in a chair looking out to the horizon and ending up sleeping there reading a book.

The quest to organize ourselves and the world and to make sense out of everything has left us so out of order and un-organized that we can wagely relate to what we are really here for and even give staggering looks to those who ask us that weird sounding question these days. We have gone so far in the quest of the false rather than the truth that eventually has made us go astray and now we are all like wandering minds in the open spaces negating to what could bring us back to order.

When you give an expensive toy to a child, it’s not unusual to find that they are more interested in the packaging than the gadget inside. This can be quite depressing, except if they are interested in one part of the packaging — the instruction manual. Then you feel a huge surge of pride: here is a child that takes the time to find out who made this toy, how it works and what all the buttons do.

We live in an age in which we feel that technology should be intuitive, which relegates instruction manuals to literature for the stupid. In truth, most modern instruction manuals aren’t worth reading in any case, since they have turned into catalogues of health and safety advice, and instructions on how to dispose of the product once it breaks.
We aren’t expected to spend much time thinking about who made it and how.

We no longer wander and hang around book stores and libraries looking for something interesting to read, we no longer read for that matter, though we will spend enormous amount of time reading people’s blogs which mostly make no sense (mine too ofcourse) but we wont spend an hour reading wodehouse, buck, burns,bryson,  chekov or anyother great writer out of hundreds of them which we are so lucky we have access to. But like always we dont like the real education, we can see book shops selling competition books like IAS, IIT RAS etc etc be all jam packed but rarely any visitors at the shops with real literacy works..that marks the end of civilization.

No wonder Hindustan was so well lookedup to in the earlier times because we were all so thoughtfull and had a sense of doing what we were doing. Being wise was a way of life, literacy does not make you wise but education do, and mind you, we all today aim to be mere literates rather than beind educated. Education means *the* knowledge , knowledge of the worlds..

We spend an enormous amount of time visiting temples and mosques and other places of worship, and what do we do there? we sit in front of the so called god being present there and we ask him to give us money, fame, a good life blah blah blah.. How do we know that by sitting there only could we talk to god, does he exist there only and no where else..

The Vedas of hindu mythology dont even mention something called god, or for that matter naming gods like we shri krishan, shiva etc, infact what it all talks about is simply an unknown inisivle supreme power, it would be most stupid to give it any kind of name or something. and more over we are not expected to ask for worldly pleasures, we should just meditate and give us our brain some food for thoughts and reason…

There is a lot in the the present world which is utterly stupid and wrong, but you can only be yourself and let the morons pass by..

Its been not more than 3 months since the inception (March 2009) of linux users group jaipur, but yet the activities/workshops organized by lugj have taken the whole town or rather a lot more than that by storm. From activities ranging from install fests and countless talks/workshops given by lug members in colleges around jaipur, raised the need of a bigger event to take place and give a chance to the yet ignorant and neglected parts of india in terms of free and open source to join the main stream community and spread what it is meant for i.e. freedom. With many active members of communities like fedora, mozilla, wordpress and sun, and also contributers to the same in lugj, the task once started was not very difficult to achieve. And soon with the help of a local college lugj announced its first majot all india event named FOSJAM short for Free and Open Source Software Jaipur Meet.

The event was pretty much planned in 10 days because workshop hungry lugj couldn’t wait for 4 months without and activity since all colleges are off during summer and the heat is a killer in these parts. So though short with time we decided to go forward with the event and did our best to reach out to as many people as possible. And more over we were fortunate enough to have speakers and free software developers like shakthi kanan, vivek khurana and atul jha agreeing to come over at such a short notice.

Since it was the first time something to happen on this scale so the event was pretty much planned for the audience in rajasthan who are still new to foss, so all sessions were kept as hands on in the computer labs provided by the college (JECRC – Jaipur Engg College and Research Center). The workshops were more inclined towards hands on sessions. So the first task was to free all the college computers and install fedora on them, (which was an obvious choice) so we installed fedora in over 90 machines, here for a report on the installation day.

D-Day :-

The event received more than 347 registrations and more than 280 people turned up for the event. The sun was not quite so friendly that day with temperature ranging much over 45C but it did not damn the spirit of freedom in people who thronged the venue way before the scheduled time.

Event started with the free software song performed by Kapil Acharya, a LUGJ member, followed by Winblows, busting balloons of (we all know what!!). The ceremony gave a rocking start to the event and all students soon felt the freedom wave sweeping them off their feet and all joined in and sang the freedom song.

Then a brief introduction of all the speakers to the gathering, followed by a word of thought by Mr. Shakthi Kannan. And at last a vote of thanks by Jai Pandya, being a member of LUG-Jaipur and a student of JECRC on behalf of both the organizations.

Since we wanted to cover more in the time we had at our disposal so talks were divided into three parallel tracks and without wasting further time Skakthi kanan (you can also refer http://shaktimaan.com which is full of resources for students and everyone) started with his talk named I-want-2-do-a-project-tell-me-how-2-do-it-fedora. The talk covered netiquettes (mailing list, IRC ,forum etiquette), what/how to choose a Free and Open Source project. Everyone really enjoyed the session with shakthi making them burst into laughs quite often, with his quick wit. The session covered all the basic things everyone should always keep in mind while working/contributing for a Free/Open Source Software or getting any help from the community.

Parallel to shakthi’s talk, Vivek Khurana was taking a session on How to become a hacker who in-spite of the hot and humid seminar hall given to him (because a talk promising to turn one into a hacker would surely attract a huge crowd where one doesn’t really know what it means to be a hacker )

and they were surely not disappointed by the way vivek showed them the to become the one we call a hacker and not a cracker and its was evident from the many gaping faces that they were astonished and glad to get the term right. The talk also covered the basics of free software, how does it matter to us, and what we can do with it .

Another parallel session (what the hell!!, how many were they? Well, there were three) was taken by Atul Jha named Yes I’ll do it my way, well, I never could understand why it was named so, but yes it was a general discussion regarding foss and some general topics which were thrown by the audience and answered by Atul, though deependra singh shekhawat (A lug member and a security specialist) talked about open standards and why are they important and why one should stick to them, and soon the topic turned to firmware and device driver and I din’t miss the opportunity to bash ATI for its aloofness with open standards.

On a moonlight drive:-

shakthi in emacs hackfest

err..what!!, not exactly as the words say it but yes, jim morrison can be considered pretty close in depicting a bunch of computer geeks gathered for the night, with all the college computers at their disposal would do, dive into the unknown (although its much cooler to be a computer nerd now, than it was in his times ) and there we were for an all night hackfest. To my astonishment more than 100 people stayed for the all night hackfest and the things were just started to get hotter and crazy (in terms of hacking)and again I was in a fix to decide which hackfest to attend, and certainly it has to be emacs, because I’d any-day prefer to know more about emacs rather than jQuery, (which has always been a mystery), so there I was listening to Shakthi Kannan on Emacs a day keeps the vi-zing away sweating, but listening (even 3 ACs in a lab with 50 people were not enough) and wondering what force does run Shakthi, who unperturbed from any external factors was busy talking to students and solving their queries. The talk went on till 3 AM with a small break in-between and. I think most windows users there (if any) have not used and thought about notepad than they have on emacs that day, and many also praised the simplicity of emacs (I wonder too) and how they really liked it and it’d be there text-editor for a long time to come (I was feeling totally lost there, seemed like I was the n00b there).

I couldn’t take it any longer and rushed for some refuge at jQuesry session by Vivek Khurana which thankfully had more n00bs than I expected and I was happy to be there. Vivek was cool and nicely handling the n00bs there, though it became more of an introductory session rather than a jQuery hackfest and he was very patiently responding to each students query, no matter how basic or weird they were and was taking full use of the whiteboard and it soon turned into a class of jQuery with rather vivek doing his job more sincerely than any teacher would.

vivek taking jQuery hackfest

Day two :-

Carrying forward the momentum of day one, day two began on a high note. There were three parallel sessions of talks/workshop from 10 am to 2pm followed by workshops from 3pm onwards. Well all thanks to Lalith Suresh because of whom we could stick to the schedule as, everyone was so tired and worn out from last nights all night long session that no organiser could be there at the venue well before 12 o’clock but the audience was rather more excited than ever to further enlighten (free) their minds, and seeing no organiser around lalith gathered all students at one place and started talking about foss in general. As the audience had some idea about the term, unlike yesterday, and were asking more questions and got an even more better understanding of the term and a lot many things. And around 12 o’clock, it was time to carry on the freedom spirit further. With the first session starting with Badam-Halwa of embedded systems (what a better way to start your day with a talk of the named badam-halwa) by Shakthi Kannan.

Shakthi introduced the keen audience to the basics of embedded systems. Students were very interested in knowing about embedded systems and many were from the robotics group from different colleges of rajasthan. It truly proved out to be a badam halwa for knowledge hungry minds. Shakthi also gave demos of some Open Source tools like gerbv, qucs, verilog, gEDA, Tk gate etc. Without wasting much time Shakthi Kannan conducted the next session on Fedora Electronics Lab Demo. This talk had live demonstrations of Fedora Electronics Lab products. How can FOSS help in every field of technology and non-technology. There were students from the college robotics group Xananoids who seemed to be highly motivated after the talk and discussed some future prospective on which they could work on. Now, the time was right for learning some basics about packaging and how is it done in fedora (especially me and udit, fedora ambassadors jaipur were happy to attend to attend this talk) and more over it was caled RPM packaging-red-hot-paneer-butter-masala (I wonder where does shakthi get these interesting names for his talks). This was a hands-on workshop and on how rpm packaging is actually done, in a very practical manner. People were quite happy to know how its all done in fedora, which was quite a mystery for many. Well shakthi had to leave for his flight immediately after the talk so he quickly went and I went to the next talk wondering what is there in it which was getting a big reception from the students and was requested for a repeat as there were more people who wanted to attend How to make a web site in less than two minutes and Atul Jha was talking about making a web site using DRUPAL in less then five minutes or rather as the topic decided earlier was, quicker than making maggie noodles. The workshop covered things from very basics like, installing a web server, basics of HTML, installing Drupal and customizing it according to one’s needs. And in the end everyone went with a website of his/her own. Parallel to atul’s talk, Lalith Suresh was giving a talk on A fools guide to high availability .

What is high availability? How is all that done? Why single point of failure is bad ? All of these questions were answered. This difficult topic was presented very cleverly in a very friendly manner. Students enjoyed this session.

The IRC session:

Now this is something which was really cool and it seemed more like a celebration rather than a talk session. Jai pandya captured the podium just as lalith stepped down and was sweeping the audience with his pep talk. Infact audience was getting restless to know about IRC finally, since they have heard about it so much in the two days in fosjam that their patience was nearing an end to know the damn thing and jai soon came to the rescue. Students got to know How-Tos of IRC, also with some briefing on some of the IRC clients such as “xchat” and “mibbit”. And just as atul’s talk in the next lab got over, I took on th e lab and without wasting a second, all participants in both the labs joined #lug-japur channel with mibbit, and soon there was confusion all over, with over 38 users (a max on #lug-jaipur till now), and then they were told about how to register your nick and some other basic stuff and after a lot of kicking and basing on the channel, finally they were told about the importance of IRC in the collaborative work, how to get help and help others on IRC. And the smile on faces showed that their anticipation was rightly served and have come-up to their expectations, which is still visible as there are people addicted to the IRC and are at #lug-jaipur channel for most of their time.

The happy guy, jai distributing free goddies

The closing ceremony (A new beginning) :-

And the guys who made it most of the event (read partying), of which after-effects are still visible in atuljha (you can guess who:) )

Well as I came out of the lab after the IRC session, I saw jai pandya throwing things in the air and guys running/rolling over each other and getting them and I wondered what has happened to everyone, they were all decent men gathered for a noble cause, and then on a closer look I saw jai throwing away mozilla badges and giving away fedora dvds and stickers, and I was at ease. There is no fun without any music and that was evident from the opening ceremony too, so out for a ‘rocking end’, lugj guitarist Kapil Acharya played some songs like Hotel California, sayonee. But it doesnt seem to end because as everyone was moving out, students started thronging speakers and organizers as soon as they came across one. So after over half an hour of random discussions and putting hungry minds at ease, it was finally over, but rather it was definitely a new beginning of a movement which was about to unfold and is unfolding everyday, with many minds aligned together to change the world. And with great hopes in minds and courage in our hearts, to change the world around us.

and finally the lugj team who made this all happen, (though udit sharma is missing and jai is taking the picture )

Well finally I can write a blog and be sure it’ll appear on planet lugj, though its been quite some time planet being out there in the wild (thanks to jaiZ, the lugj web guy) but soon had some cron job hiccups as he states them so it was down for some time and then, deepsa couldn’t take it any longer (he blogs so much that it could give china sleepless nights to bring down the content posted by him on the internet, if he could write about tiananmen square, so good luck for now chinese gov and dread that day) and decided to take matter in his own hands and fix it, and I’m happy

Here we are in MNIT seminar hall with 4 ACs running at 17C !!
Woah, what is that, yes, I am right in the middle of Rajasthan where temperature is over 45C but thanks to MNIT (Malviya National Institute of Technology) professor Mr. Gaur who supports free and open source software and was happy to give LUGJ linux users group jaipur a place to hold meetings and a 3rd year mnit student lalith suresh who told him about lug and convinced him to do so.

Lug members present at the meet listening to deependra singh talking about HoneyD, attendance was around 30.
And here we are, having our 2nd lugj meeting after fosjam.
Meeting started with lalith talking on pytgk, introducing what gtk is and how easy it is to make a GUI application with, mostly catering to the newbee crowd as we thought this might be quite helpful to all, as students who are having summer holidays could use it to do some project or something. It turned out quite good as students got to know how easy it is to design a GUI with gtk and soon people started comparing it with java and you can assume what happened there-after.
Lalith talking on wikipedia, seems like no pictures were clicked during the pygtk session, photographer seemed busy learning himself. And I can be seen in the background.
With some basic code implementation and practices, we switched to brainstorming on wikipedia but I guess we were pretty short of brainstorming ideas and had to introduce to people how to make account and stuff like how to add/edit pages/content on wiki etc, so it turned out more of an introduction to wiki rather than brainstorming on that. So we quickly switched to “What are you doing this your summer”, thought the session was not planned at first but seemed more like a need of the time, and we soon had many students sharing their ideas/projects they are doing in the summer. Some are making a LAN chat client, discussed their ideas and took some important suggestions on the same. Some are making some kind of web portal and embed video conferencing etc, dont exactly remember what it was though.
Lug members (deependra singh) could not hide their feelings for the lug, as it requires more active contributions from the community, so he showed this on the projector screen to everyone. Though the foss awareness is growing in jaipur since our inception but participation is need for usual lug tasks.
Enough of chit chatting, we then moved to dominos to get some grub in and ate our hearts out. And it has more or less become a custom to goto dominos after almost every meet, because there are guys who get out of their hackerdomes only when there is a meet-up so rather it is more than refreshing to spend around 5 hrs with each other on a lug meet.
Talking freedom (err..food) at dominos.
I havent been able to blog since quite some time now. but will follow up all the good changes in this part of the world that we are bringing here.

One of the labs for the hackfest for FOSJAM
The day has finally come to an end for all the preparations for the grand day tomorrow, and we were greeted by a sandstorm which actually brought temperatures down in jaipur which was burning like hell with 45C.

The installation team from left me, udit and linuxguru
We configured labs and installed fedora 10 in 80 machines prior to the event, which will be used for hackfest.
The team from right jai, deependra singh, udit and the lugj rocker (guitarist) kapil
Everything set and now we left for our respective homes to get a sound sleep before the big tomorrow. Though some of the lugj members happily went to a pub close by to get their spirits high prior to the event.
lugj Members relaxing after the hectic day. from right anirudh, me, udit, deependra and kapil.
The venue for the event jecrc college.

Lug Jaipur – FOSJAM
Day 0 15th May 2009
Countdown to FOSJAM
Nothing like the day, when you start it with installing fedora in hundreds of machines. Well today is that great day and preparations are are been give final touches. College laboratory machines are getting sleek fedora 10 (On college’s request winblows have not been removed,though it got removed in some of the machines by the determined advocates of foss i.e. lugj members ), xchat for using IRC during the event and loads of other cool features.
Machines getting an incarnation – fedora

Computer is laughing out loud, happy that it’s finally getting freed.
LUG members from left, me, linuxguru and udit

Right now I am sitting on the server machine for the network installation, managed by Deependra singh. A meeting of the volunteers is also taking place in the lab making final decisions. Suddenly a pissed teacher marches into the lab shouting at why everyone missed his class for this stupid event, but looking at the rage in the eyes of the lug members and everyone else putting their heart and soul into the event, he quietly went out.

LUG members doing the job. Freeing computers and giving them and a new life


linuxguru doing the dirty job, fixing machines where network installation was not taking place.

College has given away to the monotonous, traditional education environment and has joined us for the freedom celebration called FOSJAM. Students can be seen interacting with lugj members (whenever they can get hold of one) discussing some related queries and getting acquainted a day before the showdown.

Cheesy moments during the installation me, linuxguru and kapzi