Shriphani Palakodety » mukt.in

mukt.in v2

Shriphani — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:03:42 +0000

Hi everyone, mukt.in v2 is just round the corner and we are really gearing up to make it one of the best tech events in Hyderabad. I am involved in the work for like 2 years in a row and it would be excellent if the FOSS community of Hyderabad took part in the proceedings. Volunteers can register here and you’ve got to introduce yourself to the community in our currently sparsely populated #mukt.in on the Freenode server or on irc.devnode.org.

We’ve got a sizable lot at the moment in our channel who are ready to help with the coordination during the pre-event and post-event periods. We are welcome to ideas from everyone and you can tell us about them on our wiki or in our channel on Freenode or Devnode and do not dare to talk about warez / trojans / sub7 and other worthless stuff that will most certainly earn you a ban and the wrath of a dozen community members.

Though we have a few dates and possible venues in mind, we want to be extremely sure that the conditions will increase the reach of our efforts and make it easy for people in the city to attend.

I will continue being the official voice of the movement and yes, mukt.in has its own blog somewhere on its site.

Please remember that mukt.in is not a FOSS fanboy’s paradise. It is an attempt to introduce newbies to the FOSS world. Ideas that will help us reach these goals are preferred and those involving M$ and darts are not.

Well, mukt.in awaits your ideas and help, Goodbye !

Father arrives…..

Shriphani — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 01:56:38 +0000

My father came two days ago from Lagos. After the ceremonial procedures, I got him to show me the state of the site he was working on and the pictures of Amsterdam – he was there for a few days before he came here. My dad gave me his Sony Cybershot camera and also the domain http://shriphani.com . Hence my blog’s residence is here.

I’ve almost finished my essays etc. I think I will be free to work on my web application after that.

I got a mail from Pavithran S. recently. He says that there will be a mukt.in meeting on the 30th at Osmania University’s Astronomy building and I have to make myself visible there. From what I gather on iLugHyd’s forums, there is a meeting on the 30th as well. And the topic….. Rapid Web Applications with Ruby on Rails !!! This will give me the chance to learn more about Ruby and the Rails framework which seemingly is undergoing drastic changes in the soon-to-be released version 2. I tried ROR myself some time back and found that scaffolds don’t work with rails 1.99. Open source software’s biggest drawback is the lack of backward compatibility. I supposed developers have to take backward compatibility seriously. Entire applications need to be rewritten thanks to these huge changes that are incorporated into the new releases.

Dad has a few problems looking at pdf files on his Treo. Seemingly files over 1 MB in size do not appear in full resolution. I have a solution with me right now and I shall put it here in the next post.

I wrote this post right after I woke up and hence my grammar/spelling/ might not be correct.

GHOP, mukt.in stickers, sad news from NIPL and new ideas.

Shriphani — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:00:20 +0000

I finished my GHOP (Google Highly Open Participation) task a few days back. I was writing the docs for different unix platforms and it was nice to have a person from caltech monitoring my progress. I won’t say it was fun filled because it was not. I literally had to struggle to get those commands sorted out. I actually decided while writing the docs that I wouldn’t put in “./configure”, “make” and “make install”. I decided to put in useful links to help people prepare binaries for their own system. I will be getting the all important T-Shirt from them soon (hopefully). I do want to participate in a few more tasks. I actually picked a task a little too late and was left with the choice of talking on django or some other thing or writing docs. I went for the latter as both iLugH and TWINCLING won’t be meeting any time soon.

Now, I was thinking about the stickers for mukt.in yesterday. I didn’t know a lot about sticker design myself so I had to figure out something. I made myself a list of points to be kept in mind while designing a sticker. They are:

1. Imagine the object that the sticker will be stuck on. In our case, it might be cellphones (Superkiddo stuck a gnome sticker on his cellphone at mukt.in 1), laptops (I stuck two stickers on mine) and desktops (I don’t know who did this as there was only one desktop over there).

2. Pick a color that will go well on any laptop out there. My laptop is an acer travelmate with a brushed metallic finish on the keypad. A white background with a very professional font on it should look fine. A silver background seem too regular to me as the Intel inside crap or the “designed for windows xp” nonsense (it is on my toilet tank now) stickers come with silver backgrounds.

I got an idea about a firefox extension yesterday. I could make an extension that checks a website for change in content (The GHOP task page) and reports the new task through a popup. I will finish soon (hopefully)

rxKaffee, a dear friend on IRC gave me a free shell account on his new ubuntu server. Thanks rxKaffee.

Now the bad news, Argo (the server I worked on when I was at NIPL) has been permanently shut. I do remember the first time I dabbled with django on it. Made the User Request Management System on it and whatnot. Seemingly Sam Watkins (the owner of NIPL) is no longer able to generate funds for it. I am now free to provide the request management system to users. Probably it will be of use to someone somewhere. I will be putting it up today. I guess that this was inevitable considering the huge number of requests and the relatively low funds that came to the NIPL project.

Well, I will write again.

mukt.in and ZFS

Shriphani — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:06:03 +0000

I have returned from mukt.in a bit wiser. Mr. Raju Alluri from Sun Microsystems spoke about a new wave of innovation that promised to change the way the storage industry operated. ZFS- the new filesystem from Sun Microsystems. I was at my attentive best here. I began listening. ZFS presents a pool type storage (I didn’t know what this meant). He went on, “ZFS stores data as a pool and several filesystems, thousands, even more, can pull data from this pool”. Now I understand. The data speeds (I’m thinking I/O bandwidth, someone correct me if I understood wrong) are not limited to the speed of the individual device, in fact, the combined speed is available to pull data from this pool whatever be the device. WOW ! Then comes the shocker. ZFS allows one bloody exabyte as the max. file size ! Who has a file that large ? Then Mr. Alluri told us about the National Met. Org. in the US which has the largest db in the world. 300 Tb seemingly. Now met data gets constantly updated. A single backup is 300 TB, in a few years you could be touching a lot more. Again, you shouldn’t have problems trying to access the data. ZFS’s pool type system should make that possible.

I began thinking about incontiguous partitions that had been bugging us some time back. LVM is traditionally used to manage incontiguous partitions. But just imagine. With a pool type storage system, with filesystems accessing data from this pool directly, LVM might no longer be necessary at all ! And this is a big revolution !!!!!

Mr. Alluri then told us that ZFS was going to allow two operating systems to run side by side. I know this I thought. This is not a ZFS feature I thought. chroot allows me to do the same, I can install debian in gentoo etc. !

It turns out I am wrong again. ZFS will allow you to run two operating systems side by side all because of its pool type storage.

I am going to learn more about this excellent operating system over the next few weeks. I unfortunately cannot try ZFS as it is not supported on Linux and I have to learn about it only through wikipedia and other sources. MIT’s Athena Center has Solaris systems seemingly. Hopefully I’ll get to see ZFS in action there (if I make it).