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Category: FSMK

August 14, 2014

Feed of the blogs based on tags

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, linux — Tags: blog, blogspot, FSMK, planet, wordpress — Leave a comment

For the FSMK Planet, we are asking students to give us Feed links based on tag FSMK. I will use this blog to explain how to do the same in WordPress and Blogspot.

For WordPress:

If your blog in WordPress Platform is “http://ssrameez.wordpress.com” then the link for the ATOM feed for FSMK tag is

http://ssrameez.wordpress.com/feed/atom/?tag=fsmk

Please note that in WordPress, tag is case-insensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are both the same.

For Blogspot:

If your blog in Blogspot platform is “http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se” then the link for the RSS feed for FSMK tag is

http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se/feeds/posts/default/-/FSMK

Please note that in Blogspot, tag is case-sensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are different.
So ensure that you are using the right cases for the tag so that all the blogs are shown in the planet.

May 13, 2014

JavaScript browser code to invite all your friends to like facebook page

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, FSMK, programming, web — Tags: facebook, FSMK, invite, javascript, like, page — 1 Comment

We have recently announced the FSMK Summer Camp for the year 2014 and also have a facebook page for the same. We wanted to spread the word out about the page by inviting all our friends to ‘like’ the page. FB shows you a list of your friends and gives an option to click ‘invite’ for each one of them separately. When you do this, the invited friend gets a notification about the invite and hence more chances of his liking the page.

However this is still cumbersome as it means to invite all your friends which may be around 1000+, you have to click invite so many times.

But you have java script to the rescue. All you need to do is open javascript console on your browser and then execute the following code:

//Note that there is a space after uiButton. This class is the class of the invite button. var inputs = document.getElementsByClassName('uiButton _1sm');


for( var i=0; i < inputs.length; i++)

{

inputs[i].click();

}

To find out how to run javascript code in Firefox, check the following link.

If sadly you are not using the best and fastest browser, Firefox, then you can of course find similar tutorials for other browsers or realize it is time to switch to Firefox as Firefox29 is just released and its AWESOME!!!

P.S. The code was shared to me by Karthik Nayak from BMSIT GLUG.

April 4, 2014

The interesting development of Mozilla CEO’s exit

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, social — Tags: FOSS, freedom, FSMK, gay, homosexuality, mozilla — Leave a comment

I was recently talking to a friend who told me how even though the idea of Free Software is very radical, it has not been able to translate to social changes on the ground and hence cant be called as a revolution in itself. Free Software has led to completely new ideas of producing and distributing software which has again probably also led to a complete different dimension to sharing knowledge like through Wikipedia, sharing digital media like through Creative Commons license and something which is becoming very popular now, the idea of open hardware. There is also now this whole idea of community over Internet which has brought people together for very specific issues. Starting from Anonymous, to Wikileaks to Arab springs, all these are ideas where people came together with the idea of community over the Internet and then doing some changes on the ground on actual real social issues.
The latest news of recently appointed Mozilla CEO, Brendan Eich stepping down as he did not necessarily agree with homosexuality and had donated to support an anti-gay proposition is a very important development in free software evolution. The outrage it created within the mozilla community which actually led to this development is quite interesting. This states that Mozilla as one of the leading free software foundation has committed not only to equality in web and with respect to software but also equality amongst the people in real world. As a foundation mainly dealing with software and web, it has now stood for something that is involved in a social context of real world outside the realm of binary digits. This is important as it asserts the fact that freedom that we talk about in software also is equally important in real life if not much more important. Free Software, free Internet as an area of achieving freedom cannot be complete without changing things in actual society where people respect freedom of individuals in the society.
This also asserts a very different perspective of the community as a whole. Though in real world, opposition to gay marriages is very active and common, though the whole process of democracy in real world has not been able to change this in the actual society, in the virtual world, where the community is much more democratic it was able to change things for real. It leads interestingly to the idea that the real big world is not democratic enough or the virtual small world is very radical as against the actual real world. The voice of homosexual people which was not heard in real world was actually heard and echoed by the community in virtual world.
Ofcourse how this development will manifest itself in the real world inside the mozilla community, and also in other free software communities is up to be seen. Can it backfire on mozilla community where the real unequal society takes over and abandons mozilla for coming out of its stated realm of binary digits and taking part in real world issues? Will it alienate people, both users and developers who could appreciate the freedom in virtual world but cannot come to terms of such a freedom in real life?

December 12, 2013

Using jhbuild to compile and run gnome applications

by viggy — Categories: debian, FOSS, FSMK, linux, software — Tags: debian, FSMK, gnome, jhbuild — Leave a comment

I have been trying to compile and run gnome-chess from source. The first way, I tried was by downloading the source tarball and then running configure, make and make install. This worked fine after I fixed the dev libraries dependencies. This is one of the first point that you need to remember if you are compiling anything by source on any GNU/Linux distribution.

Point 1: If the compilation fails due to bad dependencies, it is generally because the dev library of that package is not installed.
If on debian, use apt-cache search to check which pacakges are available to download and apt-cache policy to check which package version you currently have installed.

This worked just fine and I was able to run gnome-chess with the latest code. Now when I modified few lines of code and tried to build it again, I started getting errors and that too in files which I hadnt even modified.

After looking a lot around for answers, I decided to use jhbuild and try compiling the source using it. I had hoped that it will help resolve all dependencies issues and hence I will be able to run the modified code.

I do not understand jhbuild yet completely, however I started following the manual in the gnome website.
Downloaded the jhbuild source from git repo.
build is using autogen.sh, make and make install.
Copied the sample jhbuildrc to my ~/.config directory.
Ran jhbuild sanitycheck and fixed the issues that were shown.
Then ran jhbuild build. This again gave me close to 60-70 missing packges.
Went through each one of them and again installed all the dev libraries.
Then when I ran jhbuild build, it started the process of downloading the source and building each of the gnome packages. In all 175 of them.
Finally I was loosing patience as some of the packages were as big as 300MB say for GTK+. It didnt make sense that just to build gnome-chess, I needed to build complete gnome from source.

This is when I met Mario(maweki) on #gnome-chess on IRC. Frustrated, I had sent a mail to games-list@gnome.org few minutes ago and he pinged me on IRC to help me.
He explained to me patiently what I exactly need to do.

Point 2:
So if you need to just compile and build gnome-chess,
Add the following in your jhbuildrc file which should in ~/.config directory.
ignore_suggests = True
This will reduce what needs to be build as much as possible

You can use the following command of jhbuild.

jhbuild build gnome-chess
Note: I had not given any module name in my previous command and hence it was downloading everything required for gnome.
This for me downloaded only 21 packages.
In some cases you may have to first build gnome-standard-themes package first. This is when the application doesnt use graphics but css-rules.

You can run jhbuild it using
jhbuild build gnome-standard-themes

However this might not always be necessary for all applications. So you can skip it safely also.

Point 3:
If you make changes to the source file and want to build the application again, use the following command
jhbuild buildone -n 'application-name'

buildone just builds the single application
-n switch is for networkless building and this will ensure that the source from your local directory is picked rather than checking out from the repo.

Point 4:
If you want to run the application from the newly build source, use the following command,

jhbuild run 'application-name'
By this, you should be able to see the changes, if any you made in the source directory.

Most of the pointers above were what Mario suggested me. I hope this would help you to get started with atleast downloading, compiling and running gnome-applications from source.

November 21, 2013

Bytestruck-13, An experience

by viggy — Categories: experience, FOSS, FSMK, social — Tags: bytestruck, center, community, mangalore — Leave a comment

I had been hearing about ByteStruck a lot for close to one year. This is how I came across PACE GLUG in Mangalore. Unlike any other Free Software fest or conference, atleast that I know of, which generally targets graduate students or working professionals, the participants of ByteStruck are actually high school and pre-university students. The event aims to introduce students at a very young age to computer programming and Free Software ideology.
My usual interaction with school students are through the community centers that FSMK runs. The centers attract students from lower middle class or poor families who are generally completely new to computers. Many of them would have used a computer only at schools with very little understanding of its usage or internals. The centers are run with the aim to introduce these students with various usages and internals of computer and actually allow them to play with and explore computers at the centers. We have been quite successful in this effort and many of the students are very comfortable in using and understanding the systems. Some of them are now trying to get into the internals of the system. By this effort, we had hoped to see if we can in anyway try to control the increasing digital divide between the haves and have nots.
With this context, ByteStruck was a different experience for me where I actually met the other side of the high school student population. ByteStruck to its credit has now become a major event in Mangalore region and attracts the best of the students from some(if not, all) premier schools and pre-university colleges who mostly(hoping that I am not over-generalizing) come from upper middle class and rich families.
The brief interaction with the students during the event helped me understand the extent of the digital divide that exists currently in the society. On one side where we are happy to introduce office tools and browser to students in their 12th std or doing their B.Com/B.Sc, the students here were already talking about Android App Development, Spoofing web pages and flashing Mint on memory card and using it on a Raspberry Pi and these are students just in their 9th or 10th grade. Not only did all of them had used Wikipedia for completing their school homework before, they also had social networking accounts and email addresses. Many of the schools which participated followed syllabus from CBSE and hence all the students were familiar with the idea of open source(I was told that they have it as a chapter in Class 9th).
This event was an eye opener for me of how much we are loosing in the fight against the digital divide present in the country. Not only do we have to start working more actively with our community center students giving them much exposure, we also need to engage with them at a younger age and get them to explore computers and internet themselves. A major challenge that needs to be addressed is to allow students as much time as possible with the systems. This will then allow them to probably come over the idea that computer is only to play games and they will start exploring computer for other things(It took me over 2 years after having my own system to realize it. :)).

October 18, 2013

Being committed to free software is the only way forward

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, linux, software — Tags: contribution, facebook, google — Leave a comment

One of my friend shared this article about how Facebook is now a leading open source contributor and how most of the web giants are encouraging open innovation. The article also mentioned about how this trickle down is helping the community in general. Though I largely agree to the points mentioned in the article, I think the author missed one main point.
It only makes sense to open source your changes rather than maintaining forks
Its a common practice for any start-up to go with free software tools. When you are experimenting lot of ideas, free software tools help you to quickly come up with prototypes which you can get it validated with potential customers. The teams can also work independently without having to deal with licensing costs and other agreements with proprietary software companies.
What I think the article missed to point out is that when companies start developing their infrastructure around free software tools, it becomes a necessity for them to contribute back their code to the parent repository. Else maintaining and merging different code bases as and when new released for the particular project is released becomes very time consuming defeating the whole purpose of using free software tools. Hence I think it is not that Facebook and Google want to open source their technologies(Definitely, it can be that they want to contribute to the community), but the choice of becoming free software users ensures that you also contribute your changes back to the repository.
For example, we know that Google dumped its Google Compute Engine Linux and shifted to Debian as per this report.

September 26, 2013

Project Idea: Hacker of the week through github and gitorious performance

by viggy — Categories: FSMK, linux, project, tech — Tags: FSMK, git, hacker, project, web — Leave a comment

Technology Required: Php/Python web frameworks like Django/RoR, Git, Mysql/MongoDB/Any other database.
FSMK has many students who have started using github and gitorious and keep working on their own projects or contribute to any existing free and open source projects hosted there. The idea is to have a web portal which keeps tracking the contribution/activity of various FSMK students on gitorious and github and rank them based on various factors. Ultimately, every week, Hacker of the week will automatically be announced. The project is to have a web portal to do this automatically every week without needing any manual intervention. There should be one way for students to register to this portal along with their github/gitorious id and the admin of the portal will approve the student’s registration. Similarly College of the week can be announced. The portal should also maintain a record of all the previous week results.

In Version 2, When a new user is registering, certain criteria needs to be met like number of active days on github/gitorious, number of times contributed to projects, minimum score based on various other criteria. Also whenever the coder of the week is announced, it needs to send email to fsmk-discuss mailing list and also update in FSMK Facebook group.

February 9, 2013

GNU/Linux uptime worldwide

by viggy — Categories: FSMK, linux, tech, ubuntu — Tags: GLUG, GNU, linux, project, uptime — Leave a comment

Wont it be great to see what is the total time that users across the globe are spending on their GNU/Linux Desktops. What if every time a user signs in a system, their usage time is recorded and once in a while this usage data is uploaded in a server. We can then extract lots of data like how much time is being spent totally, which are most popular operating systems based used, based on average uptime, we can find out the type of users and their preferred operating systems.

For example, we can may be find that people who are using say 3-4 hours a day on GNU/Linux are mostly Ubuntu and people who are using say more than 12-14 hours a day are mostly on Debian or Mint giving an indication that new users choose Ubuntu but they slowly shift towards Debian or Mint. Again just a hypothetical example.

We can also plan to have a competition at GLUG level to see which GLUG is spending most of their time on GNU/Linux.

May 1, 2012

February 26, 2012

Sky watching day expirience shared by Bhargavi

by viggy — Categories: experience, FSMK, FSMK, Fun, social — Tags: bhargavi, expirience, FSMK, sky, watching — Leave a comment

This article was written by Bhargavi about her experience on the sky watching day.

“I love science. In science, I love physics. In physics, Astrophysics is very interesting and miracle too.
On 25th of February, I had been to FSMK office with my brother to see the moon and the planets with the help
of a telescope. In that program, a professor of Indian Institute of Astrophysics had come to give us
information about our universe. It was a very interesting session.
First he told us about light. Light travels very fast at about 3,00,000 km/sec. We can see everything in
this world only with the help of light. Light is made up of invisible particles called photons. Moon’s light
take approximately 4 sec to reach the earth and Sun’s light take approximately 8 min to reach the earth.
Universe was formed approximately 4 * 10^6 ago according to big bang theory. He told us also about
position of planets in our galaxy and about the constillations. He showed us some videos related to this.
After this session, we saw the surface of moon and the planets, Jupiter and Venus and their position with
the help of telescope.
This session was very useful to me. From this session, I was inspired to become an astronomer and know more
about more universe. I thank my brother who called me to such an interesting and educative program.”

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