Category — NIPL

Well, argo is closed and the URMS that was made on it is pretty much of no use now. I have hence planned to host it on google code. I feel bad whenever I look the work I did on Argo. Well here’s the application I made.

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.

This script will get list all processes affliated to a given user. Better than ps and can specify processes per user

#!/usr/bin/python
#adminscript.py
import pwd
from subprocess import *
import pwd
a = Popen(["ps", "axo", "euid"], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
output = a.communicate()
uid_list = output[0]
error_list = output[1]
for uid in uid_list.split('n')[1:-1]:
    uid1 = int(uid)
    user_list = pwd.getpwuid(uid1)[0]
    print user_list
    full_name_list = pwd.getpwuid(uid1)[4]
    for user in user_list:
        b = "ps"
        c = "au" + user
        process = Popen([b, c], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
        output2 = process.communicate()
        list_of_processes = output2[0]
        list_of_errors = output2[1]
        print user + list_of_processes

So, I’ve volunteered to make NIPL’s wiki. I was itching to try out kid templates some time back last year and I decided to use tg as it supports kid templates by default. After I finished my wiki, it was “weighed” against ikiwiki ( it uses berkeleydb eww!). ikiwiki was going to be lightweight any given day over something so full of batteries like a wiki in tg. So out goes my work. It is over here. Let me warn you, the thing is not as good as a full blown CMS so do not use it over something like moinmoin.

I just volunteered for a free shell providing service named NIPL. NIPL stands for Nouvelles Informationzes Positives Libres. I have been assigned the task of creating a User Request Management System. I picked NIPL for the following reasons:

1. I get to serve the open source community directly or indirectly

2. NIPL users are free in the true sense of word. They give root access man !

3. NIPL is maintained by excellent devs and it would be an excellent opportunity to learn from them.

I am using django to make the URMS. Have to go now. I will write again later.