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Showing posts from 2008

A day with RMS

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Today RMS visited Bangalore again. This is for the first time I am seeing him. I am bit tired after today's programs. So, I will try to proide a brief summary of the program. I hope you know what RMS will be talking about, so I am not going to those details :) His talk was at NMKRV college in Jayanagar (Bangalore) which was very near to our office. I reached there with Jayesh around 10 am. I have seen his talks in video and today also it was a typical RMS talk. At the end of session, during questions time, I also asked one question :) I asked him: "Many free software follows release early, release often philosophy...". He interupted me, "No, that is not the case, and that is just a development methodology...". I continued my question like "Why GNU Emacs releases taking so much time...". He said, "That is due to technical reasons, you can also come and fix it (laugh) as it is free software and all the code is available in Savannah..."

Python workshop at RVCE

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Oh, it's almost 5 months I have written anything in my journal! Well, there is no specific reason for that :) But, now I can't stop writing this. I am just coming back from a two day Python workshop conducted at R.V College of Engineering, Bangalore . More than 50+ students attended this program. This was my first experience conducting a workshop. Thanks to Renuka Prasad and his students for organizing this workshop. Five of my colleagues and my friend Jayesh accompanied me, thanks to all. The program was well organized. Students were sitting in two near by computer labs. The labs also was well equipped. They provided projectors and audio support in both halls. My friends were walking from one desktop to another, without them it won't be impossible for me to conduct this. Thanks to ZeOmega for allowing 5 persons to accompany me for this workshop. I have some pictures also: 1. Ready to start ! 2. In action. 3. Ok, everything is fine. 4. With Jayesh. 5. My right an

I became a father today !

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Today at 7.30 PM (IST) our baby boy is born. Just now I took a snap:

"Open source" software production in India

In India some organizations say that they are "producing open source software" and follow a cathedral style development model ! People who produce these so-called "open source" in India presume, "code" is everything and it can be released once everything is ready. But they fail to understand that free software is not only code but also a community of developers and users around it. How to build & sustain this community is very crucial to the success of any free software project. Well, this may be true in other countries also. But recently I noticed this in some organizations especially few government funded projects. Recently when I was traveling from Calicut to Bangalore in a night bus. I happened to meet an old fried of mine who is working with a government funded organization. Most of his work was software projects which they release under some free software license. One interesting thing I noticed is that they do a lot of duplicate works and un

A challenge for Malayalee programmers !

There is a bug in GNOME bugzilla regarding a rendering bug in Malayalam ( http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441654 ). This is the last major rendering bug in GNOME related to Malayalam. If any programmers can fix it, that would be a great contribution to Malayalam computing. Please go through the bug and see if you can help. Behdad, the mantainer of Pango is looking for a good explanation of current patch. Otherwise a better patch is required based on his suggestion.

Buildout and setuptools

(A comment to blog post by Tres Seavor -- I can't figure out how to add comment there, so this post.) Buildout is build tool which can be used for any Python packages and not something only for Zope. Since it is created Jim Fulton, the Zope Pope, naturally there are many early adopters from Zope community. Buildout itself may not be enough for all purposes, but it can be extended using "recipes", the extension mechanism provided by Buildout. Buildout use setuptools, but it's not for replacing it. You can make use all features of setuptools while using Buildout. So, all the strengths of setuptools are available for Buildout also. A buildout.cfg of a Python need not to have duplicate information given in setup.py . For example, a typical configuration file for a package will be like this: [buildout] develop = . parts = As you can see above there is no additional detail, the only information given is the packages required to be developed. (Here . means pac

Unicode may destroy Malayalam language in computer :(

This is for the first time I am writing about Malayalam language in my blog. Unfortunately, this is about a catastrophe going to happen for our language :( . I created this blog for writing about my interests (Python,Zope etc.). I hope you will excuse this cross posted blog. By breaking Unicode's basic principle, that, it will only inlclude basic characters of a language, now they are going to add charaters which are formed from other basic characters in Malayalam. You can read more about the issue here: http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/AtomicChilluIsUnacceptable and in this document: http://www.rachanamalayalam.org/docs/ChilluEncodingIsWrong.pdf . The changes are added to draft version of Unicode 5.1.0, so we still have some hope that it can be reverted. Please support us ! Some background: I started the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing project almost 7 years back while studying at NIT Calicut. Later, when Free Software Foundation of India started working on this project, I

Yesterday's BangPypers meeting

After a long time, we had a BangPypers meet yesterday at ThoughtWorks office (thanks to ThoughtWorks for hosting us). Pradeep gave us an excellent introduction to Django using a TODO list application he created. This application used SQLite (RDBMS), jQuery (JS framework) and BluePrint (CSS framework). He will publish this code soon in his site.

Partial content in planets (A Request)

Philipp , Martin & Kevin : I used to read planet.plone.org using an offline feed agregator. I really like your blog posts (I never missed a single one). I have one request, could you add full content to your feeds for planets ? I could have asked this question offline, but I thought other bloggers who only give a link or part of content to planets may add their full content to their feeds. I wonder whether there is any other aspect which I don't see which prevents them from adding full content to feeds. One issue which I can see is that, very long posts may clutter the planets, but I think planets can fix it with a new design which only shows a part of the content and a link to view full content. (Feel free to make comments here )

Congratulations to Grok team for new site !

Grok project created a new simple,informative and great looking website: http://grok.zope.org/ Congratulations to the team !

ZCA Book listed in plone.org - Case study chapter

Thanks to Alan Runyan for adding the ZCA book in plone.org: http://plone.org/documentation/books http://plone.org/documentation/books/guide-to-zca/ I hope this will help to increase the readership of the book. Recently I started working on a case study chapter . The source of application can be downloaded from here: http://www.muthukadan.net/downloads/zcalib.tar.bz2 This is a PyGTK application which use PySQLite & ZODB as pluggable storages. Looking forward to your suggestions and feedbacks :)

I got my ZCA book !

Last month I purchased my ZCA book from Lulu . Today it arrived in my desk. Print quality, cover design and paper are very good. So far I am the only purchaser of my book ;) The cost of book is $8.75 and shipping cost to India will be another 6 USD. The book's PDF is available from my site . If you want to purchase is it for some reason, you can get it from here .