Saddest day

I will not forget this day (22-Feb-2010). I saw a man who was working in the noon. I saw the same man dead in the evening A poor guy from North India ( don’t know the exact place) who came to Bangalore for the sake of job. He was helping his master to demolish a building. All of a sudden the beam of the building fell over him and he died. I shed tears for him. Because I know that the government is not going to help his wife neither his new born baby ( I am not here for a flame war ). Its just a feeling that I am sharing nothing more I can do, I can only watch and cry for him. I wish some NGO’s come and help his family. Again I can only wish

Oats payasam(aka oats kheer)

I would like to share the Oats payasam recipe which I made for the dinner, with you all. After boiling milk, I added oats and sugar, and stirred. I was happily listening to Ilayaraja songs and stirring the combination. Grr. I saw the milk+oats+sugar combination turning into a payasam, may be because I added more oats. Which looked exactly like the payasam, my mom brings from the temple. Got an idea. Added cashew nut and dry grapes to the existing combination. Woow. Now it really looks awesome and tastes yummy. My roomie was laughing at me. He must have thought, “Poor chap, thought of preparing something and ended up with something else ”.

Unfortunately I couldn’t take the snap of my recipe. May be I will take next time. But this is how sometimes things workout. Some ideas come into mind. We deliver those ideas into code (milk+sugar+oats ). And then sometimes we feel that user may like to see it in a different way and  give some spicy looks( cashew + dry grapes ) for enhancement. I know its a bad analogy. I couldn’t think worser than this

FOSSMEET@NITC/2010

Day 1

After a long release schedule at office, I decided to move on to FOSSMEET@NITC on thursday night. I reached the NIT campus on friday morning. After the breakfast I had a long sleep in the guest room. By noon, I reached their Computer Center and tried to get an internet access. I started to make my slide. I finished it by 4.30 pm. By 5.30 pm, everyone gathered for the inaugural function of FOSSMEET.

After the inaugural function it was Sasikurmar sir gave a talk about Free Software.

Day 2

I woke up with a sad news. My friend Pradeepto missed the flight to Mumbai from Kolkata and he couldn’t make to FOSSMEET@NITC. Hence I decided to conduct a BoF on KDE for students who came there. But the result was disappointing. No one came for the BoF. The day started with Jain’s scribus talk.

I decided to spent time with my friends Praveen, Jain Basil, Vivek(and others). We also celebrated Praveen’s birthday.

Vivek actually took me outside for an awesome dinner.

Day 3

Day 3 started with my talk on how to build KDE for development. Unfortunately there were not more than 3 or 4 people who knew about KDE. I was little tensed because Atul was sitting in the hall listening the talk. After my talk Atul came to deliver his talk. This was second time I was listening to Atul’s talk. It was nice to hear how he was interested in technology and lot more things. I wish students would really think about engineering seriously

After Atul’s talk I along with Unni decided to conduct a Qt workshop. I thought of giving an introductory way to create small widgets, signals and slots and things like that in C++. But again the students who were there for my Qt workshop hardly knew C++.

Well altogether I found people really liked the workshop rather than talk. And hence next time I will try to submit a workshop rather than talk.

FOSS.IN/2009

Foss.in/2009 is over, but still I am in a hangover. I was fully thrilled to see the  KDE project of the day houseful and workout session that happened for foss.in. Words are less to describe how good the event was. Here is my photostream.

KDE Project of the day @foss.in/2009 (Day 3)

Day 3(Dec 4 2009) at foss.in will be a memorable day in my life. Let me describe the things happened for the KDE project of the day. The introductory talk started of with Pradeepto. As usual he gave an awesome inspirational/motivational talk.

He reminded me the talk he had given for fossmeet@nitc/2008 through which I started contributing to KDE. After that Prakash Mohan gave a nice talk on how to build KDE. Which was very important from newbie perspective because large number of audience were newbies. Apparently I could see the hall was full of audience who wanted to know about KDE and wanted to start contributing to KDE somewhere. He had explained the custom functions like cmakekde, cs, cb etc which makes our life much simpler.

After the beautiful talk from Prakash Mohan, Pradeepto came out with awesome question. “How did you got into KDE?”. This was the most interesting part. Because everyone had their own stories. Apparently some of them like Akarsh Simha and Shantanu Thushar Jha got into KDE through foss.in. And some others like Prakash Mohan got into KDE from their seniors. I was totally inspired by Pradeepto’s talk at fossmeet @nitc/2008. Pradeepto also explained us how he got into KDE. I thank  Sartaj Singh Kang for giving us such a motivational guy, Pradeepto, founder of KDE India .

Had awesome lunch with some of the students from Government Engineering College Trichur. Jain Basil( who came to bangalore and stayed with me for all the days till KDE POTD), Sruthi Devi and Vinaya( Who came here for KDE POTD to know about kstars and hack on the project) .

Post lunch session began with Shantanu’s talk on “How to become a good plasma hacker”. He described the fundamental part of plasma. He gave the audience about the basic knowledge about the data engine.

Next talk was delivered by Nikhil Marathe, who contributes to kwin. He showed the audience how easy was to write a KDE application to fetch data from twitter. That was yet another interesting thing which got lot of appreciation. I met Nikhil Marathe for the first time.

It was time to spent on localization. Yeah KDE has support of more than 53 plus languages. And Kartik Mistry described about the localization part.

In the mean while a student Vignesh along IIT Madras floks, fixed a bug for kstars. And our next session was “How easy is to fix bugs in KDE”. It was a nice experience for the audience because they were able to see how a developer/maintainer checks the patch and applies to his/her source tree. After Akarsh Simha

I got into stage to show the audience about the small bug fixes I made for KDE Plasma.

The session went on beautifully with a healthy audience. My sincere thanks goes to Madhusudan, Santhosh Vattam and Krishna who are part of KDE-India and helped us in getting stickers and posters for the KDE Booth and for the KDE POTD. They also made the session lively. So hats off dudes.

After the session we went for the dinner party.

If I had missed anyone whom I know, I met during the session please pardon me, the edit button of my blog is always open for this post to add your names.