Couple of days back I wrote about the Summer training programme from dgplug.
We got a pretty good response from the students, also few guys applied who are working in big MNC(s). The current list of the students:
* Amit Daga * Amrita Mukherjee * Aritra Bose * Arpita Kapoor * Bappy Modak * Biswas Parajuli * Chikan Banerjee * Debashri Banerjee * Deepak Kumar * Harsh Verma * Kishan Goyal * Kumarjit Sen * Mitesh Sharma * Muralidhar Kamidi * Partha Chowdhury * Pramit Roychowdhury * Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury * Ratnadeep Debnath * Ravi Jha * Ria Das * Rishi Kanth Alapati * Roshan Kumar singh * Rumpa Dey * Samarjit Adhikari * Sandeep Kumar * Sayan Chakrabarti * Shreyank Gupta * Soumya * Souvik Ray * Srinwantu Dey * Sumit Chakraborty * Sunny Sharma * Sushil Pandey * T. Vignesh Prabhu * Tanmaya Tewari * Tanumoy GhatakYou can find the course details here, the current plan is to have regular IRC based classes, plus long sessions on the weekends. Mbuf is going to start the course, he is going to discuss “Communication skills”, “Free Software project guidelines”, “Code cross-referencing tools”. Hobbes agreed to take classes on Basic system administration. Svn will be taught by Pradeepto. Pjp agreed to go for “Basics of C programming using gcc”, I am planning to take classes on Python if no one else comes up. But still we are missing guides for Vi and Wiki and all advance topics. I am asking help for volunteers to teach these tools. Classes are supposed to be of around 1-2 hour and alternative days (but all depends on trainer) in the night time in India (GMT + 5:30) over irc at #dgplug on freenode. At the end of the basic course, we are going to push the students to different FOSS projects on work on, may be starting with filling bug reports, sending patches, or documentation help. To all project developers/maintainers , if you want to get these newbies join your project, please come and give inspiration. Please mail me (kushal AT fedoraproject DOT org) so that I can arrange the schedule on irc. This is first time we are doing this ,thinking that this will help both the students and the community (to get them in the community) :)
I am looking forward for comments.
At last I am writing on my last trip to West Bengal, my home land. Was planning for the trip for quite a time as hand condition never looked cool.
First, after reaching Kolkata I visited the doctor. He checked my right arm and said it is improving and as I am not feeling anything or feeling too many things in my right arm , he asked me to wait for couple of years :( But most of the conversation with him went on “whether a girl with computer engineering degree is good as daughter-in-law or not”, I think he is thinking a lot on that :p
Reached home on Saturday night 9 o clock. Again got up early next day morning and came back to Kolkata, after spending 2 days returned to Durgapur on Tuesday in a early morning bus. Directly went to my college, where I started talking with the juniors. The talks went as every time it did previously. Started explaining with what is GNU/Linux, what is Fedora to what is Free Software. Told them about various opportunities they can get while working on different projects. I saw little bit more interest this time than last time, dgplug poster was a clear hit :) So decided to do a Fedora install fest next day. As a lug our target is always to spread Linux, so directly installing it to the newbies’ systems and fixing the problems they might get was a target this time. I took all updated RPMs from my lappy and desktop with me from Bangalore , Internet connection was/is the biggest problem with the students there. So , I distributed (actually was burning them) a DVD with a local repo full with my RPMs. I got many games and useful software there. After the collage ended I went to the local computer shop (same shop I use from 2001) to fix my broken desktop. It is P -IV box with 1GB RAM. Around 8pm at night I started feeling problems, fever came very fast with food poisoning and I skipped lunch in the afternoon as I was busy in talking with the students. Came back home around 10 at night, the first thing my father told me was not to go to Durgapur next day and to take some rest. But as I gave my word to those students I had to go. I believe the local coordinators are still missing the enthusiasm to do these kind of meetings. Took medicine and went to bed half dead :)
Next day morning was feeling far better than last night. Reached durgapur around 12. Started installations at around 1.30. We all were in a class room, around 4-5 laptops were present . Installations went very smooth. While doing installations I kept talking on various points to them. The students also asked many questions. Showed them python :) After the installations they learned how to use yum. They copied my local repo and also burned it so that they can give them to their friends. I tried to make the event less formal , tried to make connections personally with these guys as they have the capabilities to become potential contributors. I found having the personal touch with the students really help to convert them into active contributors from simple users. It was a very nice experience :) After everything finished, went back home. My home/village is around 1.5hours aways from the city of Durgapur.
Last 2 days I spent to present some introductory talks in NITDGP or BCET. You can read more about that here.
Spent most of the morning with inodes, also looked into stat , and hard , soft links.
Yes it does. I can see it in 2001 , 2005 and in 2008.
This is in 2001, just after getting into engineering college. No one ever shouted at me for taking a photo before or after. After that day we exchanged many words. She was really angry as I took it.
Above she is giving her autograph on my shirt. This was 2005 during the last few days in college. Those days. I was allowed to take as many pictures as I want. Strange enough , the day was 2nd June :p
This time she only asked me to bring my camera to take her photo. I had a sudden visit to Hyderabad, we met after 2 years. talked a lot about college days, and got this
Yesterday we had a strobist meet , it was kind of boot camp.
Had a very little(2 hours) sleep in Friday night and got ready at 4.00AM , taxi came, I went to pick up Sushma. We reached MG Road on time and then found Akshath was still at home waiting for others. Finally we (me , Sushma, Akshath, Manas, Arpita) started around 6am. Avinash and Rajesh were in the other car. Around 8 reached at the hotel where Danny and Sunil put up, had a quick breakfast.
Then we went down to the river through a pass just beside the hotel. Akshath already briefed us about the basics. I tried couple of shots in the manual mode. I always used to shoot in Aperture priority mode. We divided it two groups and people started trying different ideas. I don’t think Sushma was never bored so much in a day before :(
Around 1:30 we went to another resort for lunch which went upto 4, then as some of started doing hard light shots others took some rest. Suddenly rain came :) Had some fun while running for cover :P
After the rain stopped we again came back to the first hotel and start shooting with many strobes. Below you can see some nice setup shots :p
As far as the learning, I learnt the basics and understood that I have to do lot of experiments to reach a stable phase to understand it. Anyway I moved to manual and thats a huge thing for me :D
You saw the first photo, now the same without warming gel
The set can be found here.
It changed a lot these days. /me and kart_ are living the same house, two rooms just beside each other, if we talk little bit loudly we can hear. But almost 95% of our talk happens only in Freenode !! IRC is r0cking :)
Nothing except few clicks, and had lot of fun.
And also packaged pem
I was looking for this for a long time. It is small and simple to handle :) It keeps my daily earnings and expenditures properly, best of all it works in konsole :)
You can download it from this page.
I also created a RPM package for it, the review request is in the queue :) So , if you are a Fedora package reviewer please look into this small package :P
