Viral Sachde’s Blog

FOSS.in [X] 2010

Viral — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:26:00 +0000

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

Viral — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:24:44 +0000

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.

Barcamp Bangalore 9

Viral — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:30:21 +0000

After long interval of more than one and half year, Barcamp Bangalore‘s 9th Edition was held on 18th September at Intuit‘s Bangalore campus. There was good line up of sessions in various technical domain. I was most interested in Shree kumer‘s session on using GPU for computing, which turned out to be quite interesting. Finally, I seen some working demo of CUDA application and developer setup. Session related to HTML5 & mobile were also quite good. Thej‘s session on visualizing government data was quite interesting, specially data related to election, rain and bribe was also visualized . Prakaz was also present with bulkr, which is quite good tool for flickr users. Saurabh’s session on android programming gave me more understanding of android application programming.

All and all, it was good camp. Wish that next BCB happens soon ! ! !

Link: Photos of BCB9

Mozilla Developer Day – 2010

Viral — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:51:38 +0000

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 ?

Viral — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:49:32 +0000

(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

Viral — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:57:48 +0000

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

Viral — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:05:27 +0000

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

Viral — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:08:19 +0000

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.

Barcamp Bangalore 8

Viral — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:12:27 +0000

Last weekend, We had Barcamp Bangalore 8 at Yahoo! Campus. I met lot of people during the event and most them were from different background. Students, working professionals from start-ups as well as big companies, freelancers and few entrepreneurs too.
One of the session was Open Source Licencing model which discussed few of various licence. We had good discussion on few framework for web-site and on Twitter and Facebook. I had good discussion with Prakaz over life as freelancer. Parkaz had left his day job and started working as freelancer, he is good photographer too. To conclude, I had nice discussions at BCB8 and I felt, I did take back somethings with me. Dhempe had taken few video clips during BCB8 and have uploaded here.

Navratri ’08

Viral — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:54:27 +0000

This year Navratri dated during September 30 to October 8, 2008. We also had couple of leaves owing to Eid (October 1) and Gandhi Jayanti (October 2). Thus, we end-up having lot of garba and dandiya.

I had gone with my room-mate and few friends. We went to Jayanagar Sayunkt Mandal’s Garba for 3 nights. The venue was BES Law College ground. Typical, it starts at 10 pm with first aarti followed by slow garba. Garba picks speed over a half an hour. Besides Garba, we had Raas and Sanedo. Raas is traditions dandiya-raas, mostly as shown in plenty of hindi films. Sanedo is centuries old traditional Gujarati folk song type. During sanedo, basically we sing couples of song, covering topics like general critics, current social issues and players follow his tune.

On the last night of Navratri and next morning (on Dasara day), Gujaratis eat Fafda, Gathiya and Jalbi. We were lucky, as organizers at Jayanagar Sayunkt Mandal had decided to provide free and unlimited fafda and jalbi. We had four rounds of it. Last night, we played and enjoyed till 5 am in morning. You can see few snaps here:

Navratri 2008