Shriphani Palakodety

I just returned from iLugHyderabad’s meeting. It was fun. I met a lot of interesting folks who had dabbled with the new release of Fedora. It is not like I am tempted to try out fedora but it was fun meeting the Fedora enthusiast Rahul Sundaram. Let me recollect what happened during the meet.

The venue for the meet was the astronomy building at Osmania University. The building was being renovated and I managed to whiten my navy blue coloured jacket by plainly brushing against the walls of the building. There was no electricity in the building too. We were discussing about moving to a different room when a professor who was there to attend the talk (teaches at Osmania and has been using Linux for 12 years !!) used an extension cord that somehow could span the length of two floors. The basic infrastructure needed to conduct the event was now complete. We waited for a few more people to arrive but not many turned up. Seemingly many students had exams the very next day and chose to stay back at home/hostel to study. I began discussing about Django newforms with Theju (I met him at mukt.in . He was one of those who did a project on server side validation at the google summer of code. I will take part in this when I go to college for sure. They give out some excellent projects and help in improving one’s coding skills.). Seemingly in December, django’s creators will launch newforms (or is it newforms admin?). Theju promised to teach me how to hack up the admin interface that comes with django.

Someone at the meet with long hair had a lot of troubles with Fedora 8. Seemingly his laptop wouldn’t boot into fedora and grub would get stuck at the “Loading Grub, Stage1.5″ stage. I also remember that I had some troubles with the new linux kernel way back when I used feisty. I placed a bug report here.

After that the talk began. Rahul explained about his association with linux since the days of Red Hat Linux. So automatically becomes part of the elite FOSS gang in Hyderabad.

Rahul turned out to be a jovial speaker and his speech was littered with comic examples dating back to his stint as the “font guy”, “the support guy” for Fedora and Red Hat Linux. Seemingly on one occasion, he was called up by a Fedora user from Greece who claimed that Greek didn’t look good in the Bitstream fonts but looked better in DejaVu Sans. Rahul’s reaction was “Which one is what and what looks better?”. We all had a hearty laugh at this. At the end of the meet, we all had an “introduce yourself” kind of session and there was this guy who worked at google and was all smiles. I just adore google employees. They seem to be in love with what they do and genuinely are “good” at what they do. Krish (mukt.in organizer). So we began talking. I voiced my anger at google’s choice to make us write applications using android in java and to provide an eclipse plugin to top it all. Now eclipse is a PITA. My experience with it lasted 30 minutes. 10 minutes it took to start, 10 minutes to install the pydev plugin and another 10 to close. Rahul then came in with his comment, “Some time back, your computer was considered very robust if it could run quake at 50 fps. Nowadays, if you can run eclipse at 50 fps, your box is top of the line.”. He earned another round of applause. That is the true FOSS spirit.

I did attend a Ruby on Rails session as well sometime back at TWINCLING. Mr. A.P. Rajshekhar gave a talk on ROR and it was one of the best sessions on web development (I attended one at mukt.in. It was conducted by Thyagu) that I had attended. In a span of two hours, Mr. Rajshekhar covered a lot about Ruby, MVC and also showed us a working application by the name talewiki. Mr. Rajshekhar is also writing a book on ROR and he plans to use talewiki to teach ROR. I promise you Mr. Rajshekhar that I will be the first to purchase your book.

Krish and I are coming up with a web application of our own. I will talk about it later as we are yet to come up with a working model.

I have to still figure out how to generate thumbnails for my firefox extension. I have discovered that nautilus uses a thumbnailer that picks a particular frame of a video, the first page of a file and so on. I think I will freeze the development of filerfox and do something else with firefox. I have to scout for them though.

Anyway, See you later.