11th Edition of Barcamp Bangalore was held on 11th Feb, 2012 at SAP Labs Bangalore. Plenty of interesting sessions were held, some which interested me are 3D store, Simputer and Astronomy. I also presented small talk on Consumer Electronics Products.
FOSS.in [X] 2010
December 21st, 2010 by Viral No comments »FOSS.in was held from 15 to 17th December, 2010 in Bangalore.
I was partially present in last two FOSS.in, but this time I actively participated on all three days. It had plenty of interesting sessions and workouts (as always
). But I feel follow are worth noting:
On First Day, Danese Cooper‘s key note on running Wikipedia was quite impressive stuff. Also, Anil’s session on “Hardware Hacking for Software Hackers” was quite detailed and inspired many software developers to take interest in Hardware, which was quite visible in workout.
Tobias Mueller in his session, security in mobile devices showed various security issues in various mobile operating system on second day.
Saleem Ansari provided detailed understanding Fedora ARM and it’s built system in his session: Getting started with Fedora Embedded and QEMU/ARM hands-on. I think, it is very useful to have stable unstreamed Fedora’s ARM version to use on Beagle, Pandaboard and PLUG computers.
Besides this, FOSS.in had awesome hospitality, great Wi-Fi, yummy food and rocking music of Fahrenheit & Raghu Dixit band.
Navratri 2010
October 21st, 2010 by Viral 1 comment »This year Navratri was from 8th to 16th October.
Compare to previous two navratri (2009 & 2008), this year I played more Garba & Dandiya. I played for 7 out of all 9 nights. This year also I went to Jayanagar Syunkt mandal organized function along with my friends. Once we went to Palace Ground too and played garba at venue orgainzed by Gujarti Vasihanav Samaj.
We ate (good amount of) fafda with sambharo and marchi and (hot) Jalebi on Dasara.
![]() |
![]() |
|---|
All and all, to enjoy garba in Bangalore, Jayanagar and Palace ground are best palace. Obviously this year too, during navrati, I met more new gujarati people in Bangalore and had nice time with them.
Mozilla Developer Day – 2010
February 27th, 2010 by Viral No comments »Mozilla had organized developer day at Bangalore today, 27th February, 2010. The contents for day where quite interesting, specially Arun Ranganthan’s session on Web Standard was very impressive & useful. He showed usability of latest web standard which allows, direct play back of video, drag & drop, CSS & graphics capabilities. Besides Firefox, these capabilities should work well in Chrome & Safari (I hope, in-directly all WebKit based browser) well.
Using web standard based code instant of Adobe Flash has certain definite benefits, Such as,
- Code of sites are open & can be understand (Read: Debug/Optimization/Re-utilization)
- Works with out external plug-in.
- No need of paid & heavy weight editor tools.
At EOD, I would sum up Mozilla Developer Day as Highly technical & useful event with clear focus. With all this goodies, it will remain more memorable.
[Update: Arun has uploaded detailed report along with his presentation , which is worth checking out.]
Is it end of recession in IT sector ?
January 14th, 2010 by Viral 3 comments »(So-called) Recession is going on since last year or longer. But there are clear sign of end of recession in atleast in Information Technology sector in India.
- Recent results of Tech giant Infosys ,which even pushed stock price of TCS alot.
- IPO of Infinite over subscriced 43x times & 11x times in Retail category, surely suggests investors confidences back in IT bussiness.
- Ascent, job advertisement supplement of ToI is full again with IT jobs.
At-least picture looks bright in media, god knows what is holding inside.
Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable drive Partition table issue in Linux
January 3rd, 2010 by Viral No comments »Recently, I purchased Seagate FreeAgent Go Portable Drive. I have Fedora 12 Linux on my system & it turned out to be mess with partition table.
[user@localhost media]$ sudo sdparm -a /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Seagate FreeAgent Go 0142 Power condition mode page: >>> warning: mode page seems malformed The page number field should be 0x1a, but is 0x00; try '--flexible' SAT ATA Power condition mode page: >>> warning: mode page seems malformed The page number field should be 0x1a, but is 0x00; try '--flexible' [user@localhost media]$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb -l Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107860992 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0xa4b57300 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 60801 488384001 7 HPFS/NTFS [viral@sachde media]$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb1 -l Disk /dev/sdb1: 500.1 GB, 500105217024 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60800 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x69205244 This doesn't look like a partition table Probably you selected the wrong device. Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1p1 ? 13578 119522 850995205 72 Unknown Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sdb1p2 ? 45382 79243 271987362 74 Unknown Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sdb1p3 ? 10499 10499 0 65 Novell Netware 386 Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sdb1p4 167628 167631 25817+ 0 Empty Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary. Partition table entries are not in disk order |
I went ahead & formatted & found it working well atleast with Ext4 file system
.
Navratri 2009
September 28th, 2009 by Viral 5 comments »This year Navratri was from 19th to 27th September. For typically Gujarati person, navratri means
- To participate in arti (and obviously dont miss prasad)
- Do garba (in all possible stype, steps, as long as he can do)
- Play rass (with as many people as possible)
On top it, if he can do
- Play Sanedo
- Eat good fafda with sambharo and marchi and Hot Jalebi on Dasara
Similar to Last year, This year also I went to Jayanagar Syunkt mandal organized function, my friends and me did all above stuff
. Everyyear, it is held at BES college in Jayanagar.
This time, I did better garba, rass than last year and obviously enjoyed more. To add more, as always, last night, we had unlimited Fafda Jalebi
All and all, to enjoy garba in Bangalore, Jayanagar and Palace ground are best palace. Obviously, during navrati, I did meet more new gujarati people in Bangalore and had nice time with them.
Free and Open Source Software on Proprietary Operating System
April 4th, 2009 by Viral 2 comments »I use Linux on my laptop, so was feeling bit different when I recently used Windows and Mac on few friends laptop. I want to do some browsing and media playback. On both machines, Mac as well as on Windows, I end up using Firefox for browsing and VLC for media playback. On windows, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player was existing while on Mac Safari and QuickTime. But on both machine, default was Firefox and VLC. That made me to think about this topic of Free and Open Source software on Proprietary Operating System. I asked my friends about usage and experience with Firefox and VLC, which was positive. In one line, Both of them rocks ! ! !
So those who likes to use Firefox and VLC, take one step forward and try some linux operating system (any distribution ubuntu, fedora, centos etc.) And make a change in your life.
Those who still wants to stick with Windows and Mac, Please ask your operating system providers to offer better software. Obviously FOSS developer does not mind you providing support if asked in proper way, although many times people ask and expect different level of support and make developer frustrated. Otherwise as I mentioned, Best use of Internet Explorer is to visit mozilla.com and download Firefox.

