FUDCon Pune 2011: Less than 48 hours to go!
Posted: 2011-11-02T18:19:17+05:30Firstly,
and I’ve got a lot of things to do once I’m there!
FUDCon Pune 2011 has a wonderful line-up of talks and sessions going for it this weekend. I have added three workshops of my own too:
- Getting started with autotools: This is intended to be a hands-on session on autotools. I have done this session multiple times before and it has been quite successful with beginners looking to understand the GNU build system.
- Security exploits, Live!: This was originally Amit Shah’s idea, since he wanted someone to do a demo of buffer overflows and similar stuff. You don’t really have to be an aspiring security professional to attend this, since most of the ideas are based on basic programming fundamentals
- Apache Qpid messaging: “Enterprise Applications” are not typically things that you deal with when you’re in college. Quite often one ends up thinking of these things as inaccessible due to high costs and high perceived difficulty level. In this session, I intend to demonstrate how easy it is to write really complicated applications with mind-blowing ease.
The end result is pretty impressive and we’re expecting even more submissions to keep people busy. There were concerns on whether there were too many sessions running in parallel, but I don’t think that matters. The event attendance is expected to be quite large, so there will e enough audience to keep all speakers busy. Besides, I don’t know a single conference where one gets to attend each and every talk in the conference. The real fun of the conference is to meet friends, collaborators and fellow geeks and not just sitting in rooms and listening to people talk.
Oh, and we have hackfests throughout the day on Sunday. The one I am particularly psyched about is Kushal Das’ libgqpid. It was an idea we had brainstormed about earlier and he wrote a lot of the code in it. Hopefully we can get a release out on Sunday with the core qpid client features ready. For the uninitiated (which is pretty much everyone I guess, since Kushal has not published the code yet), libgqpid is a glib based C wrapper around the qpid C++ client.
Looking forward to having a great time at FUDCon!
Preparing for FUDCon -- Fedora Activity Day
Posted: 2011-09-25T00:08:00+05:30September has been a very busy month for me with Siddhi going to UK for her studies, Mom moving in with us and my role change at work. In all of this confusion, a Fedora Activity Day (FAD) was planned for 10th September. I had to skip it because I had to go to Mumbai to spend the week with Siddhi before she left for Manchester. (Un)luckily, that FAD was rescheduled because of some last moment issues at COEP and it finally happened today at our office.
This FAD was planned to be something of an initiation for students so that they could do much more at the FUDCon than just attend talks. Going with that theme, I pitched in to do a rerun of my autotools demo that I had done last year, and even in the Fedora classroom. It is one of the basic things that a Fedora packager ought to know and if we're doing sessions on packaging, we might as well throw in some autotools foo.
There were a bunch of talks planned, mostly by Rahul Sundaram and Shakthi Kannan and then some by me, Prasad, Kashyap and Shreyank. But only a few of those talks actually happened. Essentially, since I came in, only I, Shakthi and Rahul spoke at all.
To begin with, I was late. According to the schedule, the talks were to happen in two meeting rooms in parallel and me and Shakthi were to do the autotools demo in parallel in both rooms. But when I reached office, I saw that there were enough to fit into one large meeting room, so scheduling talks was going to be easier.I had missed Rahul's first talk and he had already begun talking about packaging. Rahul walked everyone through the process of packaging the hello world app. After joking around a bit with Pai and Kushal, I joined Kushal and Shakthi in helping those who got stuck in the packaging demo.
Lunch followed the rpm walkthrough and we literally destroyed the pizzas that came in - there weren't enough in the end and we had to order a few more pizzas.
While the pizzas were being delivered, Shakthi walked everyone through version control using git. The main theme was managing love letters to various bollywood superstars using git. Pretty entertaining :)
After the second lunch break (where more pizzas were quickly destroyed), I was to start my demo on autotools. Before it started, Pai and Kashyap had a couple of quick 2 minute talks. Kashyap because he was asked by a number of attendees on how upstream, Fedora and RHEL were related. He showed a quick 1 minute video in which Paul Frields explained how bits come in from upstream into Fedora and finally into RHEL and how engineers from Red Hat are involved at every stage with the community. Pai wanted to gauge audience interest in databases and their role in ERPs -- there were a fair number of people who were interested, so we might see a talk from him on those lines at the next FAD.
My autotools walkthrough ended up being the last thing on the agenda because I (just like the talks before me) took more time than was allotted to me to finish. We finished with some good feedback and suggestions for improvement from the audience.
The best takeaway from this session was the involvement of all of the students who attended today's FAD. The schedule was quite gruelling and all of the walkthroughs were very intense. Despite that it was refreshing to see all of them putting their heads down and giving it their best, asking good questions and not giving up at any stage. I am hoping that we will have a similar if not better response in our next FAD in October.
FOSS.in day 2 - The Fedora miniconf day
Posted: 2010-12-17T15:05:00+05:30I concluded my previous post yesterday, on my way to FOSS.in to attend day two. Before I left, I saw Gopal saying w00t! to Pradeepto on twitter and wondered what was going on. Turns out, Pradeepto was coming to FOSS.in!
When I arrived at the venue, I found that we had (once again) captured a table in the Expo area. We spread out the DVDs and buttons and waited for people to come over. Saleem was obsessed about spreading the DVDs in a perfect line and arranging the buttons to form the 'f' of Fedora. of course, people were constantly picking the buttons from the 'f' and ruining his design. Fedora goodies were a hit on the first day and we had quite a few people picking them up on the second day too. There were a few people asking for 64-bit DVDs; we might have to note that in future conferences and hopefully till then the flash nonsense will sort itself out. to me, that seems to be the only hurdle right now for a completely trouble-free installation of a 64 bit system.
We had a few people coming over asking for help with their installations and some of us helped out till lunch time. I then met Pradeepto and Sujith along with a bunch of KDE folks for lunch. Post-lunch, we had the Fedora miniconf.
The miniconf was sort of not very well timed for me, since I wanted to attend artagnon's talk on the git object store. Rahul and Amit Shah kicked off the proceedings and Amit gave the first talk of the session. Rahul announced the workouts -- the Fedora for Kids spin by Aditya Patawari and Fedbura Bugzapping by /me. I went up to the first floor and waited for prospective contributors. Two people came in, fish_sticks and jijo. I walked them through setting up their Fedora account, bugzilla account and the sign-up for bugzapping. I also walked them through triaging bugs and the different scenarios they would face. They then started setting up virtual machines so that they could reproduce bugs in emacs. Finally, we could not get much done at all, since neither of them could get their virtual machines up and running in the time we had. Both were running Ubuntu -- it's kinda hard reproducing Fedora bugs in Ubuntu ;)
While this was going on, I was also discussing packaging with some college students from Vellore. Their college had a CMS that students had designed and they were presenting it in the FOSS.in expo. I think it was Pragyaan CMS; I can't remember the name. I volunteered to help thm get started in packaging it for Fedora. I did not want to do it myself since I personally do not have any use for a CMS. They were again trying to set things up to try out a small test rpm package using a tutorial. That was kinda hard going though since they too were using Ubuntu.
In the end the best I could do was point them to some documentation and give some tips on how they could get started and where they could get help. I think they finally joined Aditya's workout, which seemed to be a very crowded affair -- possibly the most popular workout in FOSS.in. I'm not sure how it went though, since I was busy talking to Philip and artagnon later. Oh, I had another person approach me for bugzapping when I had wrapped up and picked up my stuff -- he was a Fedora user for a change ;) We could not really sit down and work on something at that point since it was a little late, so we talked about how he could sign up and start contributing. I hope he finally does sign up for bugzapping.
The day ended with a security talk by James Morris. I made a quick exit after that since I had promised my wife that I will have dinner with her.
I will not be attending day 3, since I have a few things to wrap up before I leave for a week long holiday in north India tomorrow. It's unfortunate that I will be missing Aanjhan's closing keynote as a result. Like the last FOSS.in, I will remember this event for friends -- all the people you get to meet only once a year as well as new people you meet and exchange ideas with. It was definitely not as crowded as last year though. Too bad this will probably be the last FOSS.in, but I hope there is a similar conference somewhere similarly accessible next year.
FOSS.in Day 1
Posted: 2010-12-16T11:39:00+05:30So I made it to what apparently is the last FOSS.in. It was late as usual and so I did not miss much by reaching late. There was a bit of confusion about big grown men like myself coming in as student delegates, but that was cleared out fairly quickly when one of the organizers explained to the volunteers that miniconf speakers were to be admitted as student delegates. I am to conduct a workout today on bugzapping in Fedora today (day 2).
The beginning of FOSS.in was definitely less emphatic than before. Kishore Bhargava had replaced Atul Chitnis with the kick-off ceremony. That was quickly compensated however, by a really interesting talk by Danese on Wikipdia and its technical architecture. There was talk of an Indian mirror. That will be a very cool thing if it materializes. I'm sure one of the IITs can set aside bandwidth and hardware for them.
The wikipedia talk was followed by two completely technical talks; on page cache optimization in VMs by balbir Singh and the other by Lennart Poettering on his latest interest -- systemd. Balbir Singh's talk was quite interesting, where he ex[plained the problem of page cache duplication between guests and hosts in a VM environment. He went on to explain a few possible approaches to solving this. Lennart's talk didn't give anything new for me since I had been following the Fedora devel discussions.
Me, Shreyank and Rahul Sundaram then spent some time pulling artagnon's leg. We went back to the main hall in time to see Philip Tellis finish his talk. Rahul then followed that with his talk on failures in Fedora and what we learned from them.
We finally moved on for our Fedora dinner. Dimitris Glezos wanted to have kababs and we were told of a place where we could get good kababs. That was good, except for the fact that we didn't know where it was. After running around Forum mall looking for the place, we finally settled for Firangi Pani inside Forum mall. All that most of us ended up having was drinks and starters (kababs of course). Lots of them. That accompanied with Lennart and Dimitris discussing how they could get translations from Transifex to systemd with all of the commit log intact. We'll probably hear more about it once they actually reach a conclusion on that.
Now I'm sitting in the bus writing this post and preparing for the workout that I will be doing today. I hope I get a few bugzappers interested today.
Lots and lots of work
Posted: 2010-06-12T03:15:00+05:30The past week has been quite hectic, with a lot of juggling between different things I have been wanting to do. So here's what I had on my mind:
- I have been looking to learn more about compilers. I goofed off in college and missed out on the same course that was taught twice. I always understood enough to fool my teachers into thinking I knew it all, but not enough to really know it all. Or some for that matter. So now I want to make up for it.
- I had not touched ayttm and libyahoo2 for quite a while. So I wanted to do something there
- Kushal had asked me if I could package libraw for Fedora because some random app needed it. He asked me because I knew autotools and I could autotoolize the project before I package it.
- Rahul pointed out this cool little command line audio player called gst123. I had been looking to write something like this for some time now but I just could not wrap my head around gstreamer. I tried it and immediately fell in love. I just had to package it for Fedora.
- Work at my day job. Lots and lots of work.
- Work at my day job. Lots and lots of work. Yes, it is worth mentioning twice
And so here's what I actually ended up doing over the week:
- I had bought 3 books to study compilers. They're just lying there since I haven't had enough time to actually start studying.
- Nothing on ayttm and libyahoo2. Not enough time
- Packaged libraw and submitted for a package review. There is no activity on that bug report yet, but there was some action before it. Libraw upstream does not like autotools, so I had to hand-write a configure script to detect stuff. I also looked up and tried out the app for which Kushal wanted me to package libraw. The app is Shotwell, a photo management program. And it is good; I'm starting to use it for my photographs now. I'm glad I decided to package libraw for it.
I packaged gst123. The package has been approved and I have already submitted an update for F-13. I did this while on a bus from Pune to Mumbai :D
gst123 is a really cool app, try it out. It might not play internet radio streams right out of the box (my use case), but you can easily pipe/grep/cut your way to getting it to work. Here's how I play the radio stream from Absolute Radio:
gst123 `curl -s http://network.absoluteradio.co.uk/core/audio/ogg/live.pls?service=vcbb | grep File1 | cut -d '=' -f 2`
See, it's so easy!
Oh yeah, work at my day job. Lots and lots of work.
Fedora Activity (half) Day
Posted: 2010-05-31T21:24:00+05:30The FAD (Fedora Activity Day) was announced over a month ago with an intention to get some real work done during an event. I really only had a chance to participate in 1/4th of the FAD (1/2 day on Saturday), since I had to fly to Bangalore on Saturday evening to spend the weekend (or whatever was left of it) with family. But that was enough to get whatever I wanted out of the event.
Being pretty much a newcomer into the Fedora community, there wasn't much that I could think of to directly contribute but I wanted to do something. I really only maintain 1 package, which also does not have much traffic, so I wasn't exactly brimming with ideas. Rahul helped me there by asking me to do an Autotools workshop. I was also looking forward to meeting some of the guys I had met at FOSS.in last year; Susmit, Hiemanshu and Sayamindu. I could not meet Hiemanshu (did he come at all?), but it was good to meet Susmit and Sayamindu after quite a long time.
We started the day with my autotools workshop; I hope at least someone found it useful. I demonstrated the process of autotoolizing a simple C program using the same example I used during my Fedora classroom session earlier this month: linkc. The main reason I keep choosing this program is that I am too lazy to find or write anything on my own. The other reason is that the program helps to cover quite a few things at one go -- it is small, it has an external dependency, a subdirectory and some distributable files. So all those things win over the fact that the app just doesn't work as advertised. Oh well...
Once the only "session" of the day was over, everyone announced their aims for the two days while Sankarshan distributed some swag (t-shirts, stickers and buttons). After that it was pretty much everyone working on their own stuff. Me too.
Only a couple of days before FAD, Ray van Dolson added me as a co-maintainer for libyahoo2 in Fedora so that we could share the workload of doing releases/bug fixes. After discussion with him, I decided to do a libyahoo2 release into rawhide during the event. So I finally had something that I could do, which was much closer to Fedora.
I knew that the release would break freehoo, a console messenger for yahoo since libyahoo2 1.0.0 broke all backward compatibility, so I set about fixing that. The result was a bug report with a patch to fix freehoo to build with the latest libyahoo2. Finally, I also changed ayttm to dynamically link against libyahoo2 instead of cloning the code base all the time. There was absolutely no incentive in maintaining two code bases for it, so it finally had to go.
By the time the ayttm change was done, it was time to leave. But before that, Kushal asked me to take a look at libraw to see if I could pitch in with something there. So I will be looking at autotoolizing it and packaging it for Fedora. I was supposed to do it today, but all of my day was spent in playing catch-up with work at my day job. Maybe I'll have more time tomorrow for it.
gource in Fedora
Posted: 2010-02-23T11:11:00+05:30My first package submission was finally completed a few days ago with everything from ticket overload, personal issues to my US trip making sure that I had little time to get things done on time. I had started this in the first week of December and it took all of 2 months and some days to get my stuff together and put out an rpm package for gource. It is finally done now and you can install gource on your Fedora 12 box (or later if you're nutty like me) with just a
~# yum install gource
I've built gource only for F-12 and later since F-11 does not have the required version of ftgl. That is OK I guess since F-11 is way too old anyway ;)
FOSS.in/2009 Day 4: cd
Posted: 2009-12-05T19:26:00+05:30The last day of FOSS.in. Kartik wakes me up saying "You have to pack, get up". I got up, went across the hall and rang Ram2's bell a few times to wake him up.
So I packed up my stuff and got ready. This time I did not forget to wear my fedora. We had our breakfast and realized that a number of people had left early, either for the venue or to meet someone in the city. When we went out to our bus, we found that it was not there. We started talking to rickshaw drivers and bargaining with them when one guy came up to us saying that he was here to take some people from the hotel to NIMHANS. That was us. But we weren't sure, so we had him call his boss and confirmed that it was indeed us.
Susmit: "Well, if he wanted to drop us to the venue then why are we wasting time calling people? Why not just pile into the bus and go ;)".
So we finally reached the venue, only to find that it was almost deserted. People started crawling in quite late and the place eventually filled up. I sat down with Kital at the Fedora booth and fixed my package submission for Fedora. At 12:00 I went up to Lennart's FSH talk, but did not find it as useful as the previous talk. He could just have combined this one with the last talk and done one marathon talk, but I guess that would have been too long. Anyway, it was time for lunch.
I was pretty listless after lunch because there wasn't enough time to hack on anything significant, so I decided to take a nap at the booth. I woke up to find that I had only 20 minutes to say good bye to all the people I came to know during these 5 days. Wait, a phone call. An automated message telling me that my flight had been delayed by half an hour. Well, I had some more time now, so I went up to the hack centre to check out who was doing what. I bugged Gopal for the Speaker kit and he finally shooed me off with some stickers. I told him that the coordinators had done a great job, something I managed to notice this time since I was not sitting in the corner and hacking like last year.
While I was roaming about, I entered the Gnome POTD and saw Oliviere Crete giving a talk on Telepathy. I sat down and listened. And I have to admit that I was quite impressed with the layout. I remember wondering why I was working on getting ayttm and libyahoo2 up to speed when such a wonderful effort was underway to do messaging the *right* way. Now that I think of it though, it is not the only right way to do things. While ayttm may not be as extensible as the Telepathy framework+Empathy, etc, it has a totally different use case. To be able to fit into a sub-1 MB package and work well with minimal dependencies. And it can work on *BSD. The workout participation for ayttm unfortunately fizzled out since it was pulled off the itinerary and it is not popular or cool enough for people to want to contribute to it. But I managed to make some headway into the chat window stuff and will hopefully get that out of the way soon. Next week I plan to work on the webcam stuff for yahoo at Rahul's request. OK, I digressed.
I had to leave the talk halfway since I was getting late. I stepped out of the hall and managed to say goodbye to everyone I recognized and could catch hold of. I managed to find Pradeepto just as I hauled my bags up to leave. We said our goodbyes and I left for the gate, trying to find a rickshaw. But what I found was a bus, a BIAS-7 going to the airport :)
So I'm now sitting in the airport lounge reflecting back on one of the best events I've attended so far. This was very special for me because I got to know a lot of very good guys: Pradeepto, Aanjhan, Sayamindu, Joerg, Gopal, Susmit and so many others. The best part of the week was the BoF sessions all of us would have in Pradeepto's room, talking about foobar and sharing stories. I did not have too many uber hacks to talk about through this week, but a lot of cool incidents that seemed to make a big difference to the way I thought about the Indian FOSS movement and the people involved.
This was fun. I hope I get to do this more often.
FOSS.in/2009: Day 1
Posted: 2009-12-03T14:27:00+05:30Got up late and rushed through my bath and breakfast. I realize that I did not talk about the hotel I am living in. Well, the bed is too small, the toilet seat is too tall and the bathroom in general is quite claustrophobic. But otherwise it is a really good, clean hotel.
OK, so we made our way to the venue and were pretty much holed up inside auditorium 3. I managed to get an app packaged as I mentioned in my past post. The upstream dev acaudwell immediately responded to my patch to update version number in configure.ac, so that hurdle is out of the way too.
The Fedora team had a blast at night with food and beer and managed to rake up a huge dinner bill. I missed out on it since I was in the mood to sit and hack on something. Well, I did not. I ended up discussing a bunch of things with Ram2 and Amit Sethi.
Oh yeah, and met up with Philip too after a long time, so that was a bit of a ayttm team reunion sans Piotr :)
My first Fedora package submission
Posted: 2009-12-02T17:13:00+05:30I have created and submitted gource for review in Fedora. It's a really cool source code history visualizer. It's not perfect by any means, but a very good start. It works out of the box for git, but needs some scripts to get it working for cvs and svn. I'll be trying to write some sort of a wrapper to detect cvs/svn and invoke the scripts automagically.
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