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April 25, 2024

Tag: community

September 2, 2014

Taming googlegroups for those without Gmail Account

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK — Tags: , , , , , , , — Leave a comment

I have recently migrated my primary email address to my own domain and started using it for all communication purposes. One of the main thing is to subscribe to various Google Groups which GNU/Linux User’s Groups under FSMK have. The straight forward way, you would think, would be to just search for the groups in groups.google.com website, then there should be a subscribe button where you would enter your email address and then you should receive a email to confirm that you want to subscribe. This is what most of the mailing lists software would do. However not Google Groups. If you want to subscribe to Google Groups, when you click to join the group, it asks you to sign in a Google Account, hence any non-google account wont be able to subscribe to a group.

The other way is to request the group admins to add your email address in the group, this will not work always as most of the times I wouldnt even know the admins of the group. Also it means that you now have to depend on the other person to find time to add you which will be slow. Idea of public mailing lists is that anyone interested should be able to subscribe. Unfortunately google does a reasonable job in ensuring it becomes very difficult for you unless you have a Google Account.

So I found out a more difficult way to subscribe/unsubscribe google groups and this is again borrowed from traditional mailing lists softwares.

If you know the google group’s mailing address, say

glugdsce@googlegroups.com

You can subscribe to the group, by sending a mail to

glugdsce+subscribe@googlegroups.com

To unsubscribe, send a mail to

glugdsce+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com

Similarly, to directly visit the page of the group in a browser, you can use the following link

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/glugdsce

In all above cases, just remove glugdsce with the name of the group that you are interested in.

Overall, I think Google Groups continue the evils of Google and if you are a well established group/community, it is always better to host your own mailing list and move out of Google Groups as soon as possible.

 

December 20, 2013

The question of Hope in the Godless world

by viggy — Categories: experience, God, social — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

Often when you talk to people about God, one kind of people talk about the idea that they do not believe any one particular God or necessarily follow everything that is mentioned in their religion of birth. They believe in the idea of a universal God, One God for all theory and may be they feel that the moral explanation given in their holy books are close to what they also believe, however they are also glad to listen to what other religions say and might also go to some extent criticizing some aspect of their religion. These are the people from the modern society and they accept that Homosexuality is a personal choice and hence if their religion opposes it, it is not correct. Similarly these are the people who feel caste discrimination is not right and they dont mind eating and mingling with people from other castes.
The main reason of such people for belief in God is the notion of Hope that they receive in difficult situations. They believe in the super-natural being who wouldnt allow unjust things to happen to people like them who have always tried to be ‘morally’ correct. Of course, the notion of Hope is very important in the fast moving world of current society where things change rapidly and there is hardly anyone who has time to sit and listen to you. Hence the existence of supernatural being who keeps watching you and ensure that you are safe would definitely bring comfort.
While I was talking to a good friend of mine, he mentioned that this growing market for hope was what the current industry of Gurus and Swamijis trying to cater to. As people start learning about science in their education, even sub-consciously they would start questioning various myths and stories that revolve around their religion. Their idea of this supernatural being starts breaking and this is where Gurus and Swamijis come and patch things up for them. The idea of meditation where you start connecting with the super natural being, the idea of Yoga and Suryanamaskara where you start connecting with the nature seems to be a way of taking people back in that direction by telling them things which they again do not understand fully. However the instructions and manuals and the lectures now have scientific jargons which makes you feel more connected to the idea. However these ideas are something very new to me and hence I wouldnt delve into that topic.
What I am trying to understand in this blog is about what happens to the idea of Hope in a godless world.
I once noticed a beggar sleeping at a corner of a bus stop. Just on the other side of the bus stop was a bog sleeping. It made me realize how the life of the two is hardly different. Both would spend each day trying to find something to eat for themselves and that was probably their main activity of the whole life. Searching and scrounging for food. In this respect, what would the idea of Hope be for both of them. Would the beggar being a human think of existence of a God who would help him get food everyday.
To understand this, I think we should look into the idea of Hope amongst animals. How do animals in this barbaric nature survive? What is the idea of hope for a deer running with all its might to escape from a chasing tiger? Would it also have this notion of a supernatural being who would help it to survive from the hungry beast? I dont think there is way we can prove or reject this. We can only say that we have not yet seen some Dogs meeting every once a year and dancing or howling all at the same time in front of a some stone.
However there is one thing that we do see amongst the animals. They do live in groups (I am not sure if there every species of animals live in a group. Also considering living being, we also need to discuss about the idea of hope for Plants, but I will not delve into it.). Is it possible that the idea of being a part of a larger group which is formed to ensure safety of all its members is the Hope that animals have. Is it possible that the deer running from the tiger has the hope not that there is some supernatural being who is going to save it for its so called good deeds but it has the hope that its group members might help to save it.
I think this idea of group/community is very important even for people who understand that there is no super natural being taking care of them. (To Be Continued….)

November 21, 2013

Bytestruck-13, An experience

by viggy — Categories: experience, FOSS, FSMK, social — Tags: , , , — 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. :)).