Well I am amazed :)
The first impressions on
drupal were "it looks sick!"
Actually the default template is an "eye sore" ,now I am least bothered about it.
But what I wanted to say here is
I have looked at
joomla and
wordpress and believed that it has the biggest community of followers and drupal is for mostly the
"GNU" people ! I
was wrong , it has an
amazing community behind it :)
I still remember the preparations for
mukt.in event 2 when we had a big fight on content management systems. I was the most verbal opposer of drupal which was installed by
atul jha. we have come a long way and now are using a "conference management system" from fossconf event designed in django :)
It took me some 4-5 days to get a
real hang on the working of drupal but I am still not happy with the way administration is handled by drupal when compared to Joomla or wordpress .
Modularity is one reason why I still stick to drupal and its huge community makes it just more tempting despite the shortcomings like the ones I have mentioned above .
Just go to the
drupal modules project page and search for the web tool you want to integrate with drupal .. voila its
THERE !!
Labels: cms, content, drupal, event, foss, tools, web
I'm Celebrating 1 Billion Downloads Firefox
Labels: browsers, firefox, foss, open standards
Yahoo is shutting down
360 , users are given an option to transfer content to
profiles .
We might wonder .. why
profile ?
This is what
Yahoo say's
Today we began rolling out a beta version of the new profile. This is the first phase, as the profile beta is a work in progress and we will be continuously enhancing it over time. Read more about today’s development on the Yahoo! Yodel Anecdotal blog (http://ycorpblog.com/2008/10/16/your-social-control-panel)
The updated profile will be a central control panel for your online activity making it easy for you to manage your identity, activities, interests and connections. We want to help you better connect with the people that matter to you in the easiest way possible, whether it’s sharing your interests, connecting with people from your address book, or keeping on top of what your friends and family are up to. The launch of the profile beta is just the first step in a larger effort to make Yahoo! a more social and dynamic place.
The reason
Yahoo gives for closing 360 is
Though 360 gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo! 360 and transition users to profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo! 360 users until we officially shut down 360.
Hmm so it's all for better user experience ..
Yahoo does such strange things , it has some pairs of similar products .. looks like they are hurting it's business.
- 360 vs profiles
- Yahoo photos vs flickr
- Yahoo bookmarks vs delicious
- Geocities Vs Yahoo briefcase vs Yahoo small business
I have lost some photos & will be loosing 360 and geocities content if I don't act soon !
I wish
Yahoo all the best and hope your new strategies establish you as a
viable competitor to
google :)
Labels: 360, delicious, google, photos, profiles, SNS, yahoo
This is how Kubuntu Release announcement is
Kubuntu 9.04 Out in the Wild
What makes this release wonderfull is it comes with KDE 4.2.
This is what the release tells about KDE
On the top, KDE 4.2 brings beauty, innovation and updated software with new & improved features. Underneath, updated kernel and core systems bring stability and speed.
More information at
Kubuntu 9.04 Release /me still uses debian lenny with 4.1 :)
Labels: foss, kde, kubuntu
I came across this
Bring Down IE6 initiative from my
favourite magazine :)
I must say thank you to
twitter and especially
neenaoffline's twitter page which made me know that such initiative exists .
Most of my blog readers know that
IE6 doesn't follow standards,fails ACID tests and is quite an unstable browser which not only breaks down easily but also forces web designers to write some quick fixes and non standard compliant work arounds to make their site to work in
IE 6 .
This is quite unhealthy for the
websites,
web designers and finally the users of the web .
So join us in this Bring Down IE6 initiative by first stop using
IE6 ,
tweeting ,
blogging and
digging about our initiative and finally asking your friends to do the same !
Labels: browsers, web, websites, webstandards
Dedicated to Team Mukt.in Krish,
Atul,
sup3rkiddo,neenaoffline,shriphani all of us were satisfied with our event , but all of us wanted a change in event , to make it more better !
Krish and me when we went to
CBIT were offered better venue and more cooperation at the event than what we could have recieved at GIOE. Hence we planned to get more out of the venue next time ;)
We didn't promote our event well and we mailed to
ILUG Hyderabad just a week before event .
Well this
thread at ILUGC was quite a education for us
Our list
mukt@googlegroups.com started getting some good traffic and we started hangin out more at
#mukt.in and we were joined by some new volunteers
punchagan,jeevan ullas and shivaji at the channel and started gearing up for Mukt.in V2
Labels: foss, Hyderabad, mukt.in, mukthyderabad, muktin, muktv1
Dedicated to
krish and A
tul JhaThe Event
August 24th 25th and 26th ofthe year 2007 were the three days of the event .
The Banner which
Krish designed with the help of a painter welcomed us at GIOE .
Krish and me used to visit
Atul Jha at his uncle's place to discuss the event . The essential stuff we used to discuss were :
- Speakers
- Audience
- Venue
- Volunteers
We didn't have many speakers for the event :
Raju Aluri ,
Thejaswi,
Thyagu and
Sup3rkiddo were the speakers other than we 3 for the first Mukt.in . They did a great job :)
Audience : Other than few volunteers , few ilughyd people, some osmania students(less than 5 ) all the others are GIOE students .
Venue : The days -2 and -3 we had quite some issue with venue . The hall they promised us was not good for a projector .
Krish didn't bargain well ( understand they were his ex prof's ) Somehow we talked over with prof's and got the other hall on 2nd floor which belonged to other department. ( tv and communication I guess)
Volunteers:Now that venue issue is solved . we need volunteers, not those who hang out at #mukt.in the real ones, and Atul Jha was just awesome he really could gather them and make them do things .
I remember
sup3rkiddo joining us just before the event , he was of great help . He and
Atul did some groundwork at the venue with the help of these volunteers .
The Talks : Raju aluri from
Sun Microsystems spoke about FOSS softwares in sun like OpenSolaris & NFS . I spoke about various licenses which I think was not suitable for that audience. Atul Jha gave his inspirational talk on Linux . Krish talked About Linux on desktop.
On the day 2 we organised install fest of linux planned to coincide with Linus Torvalds birthday . we could have done better with install fest , we didn't test all the distro cd's before the fest.
Day 3 was aimed at contributing to FOSS with talks on subversion,localisation and ruby on rails . Thejaswi talked on subversion , I thought he was the apt one for it cause he was a Google Summer Of Code student . I handled localisation talk and did take some interested students email addresses .
Thyagu talked about employment opportunities in FOSS and Ruby on Rails .
Thyagu is a good PR guy , great talks from him ;)
Feedback :- "The team comprising Atul, Krish and Pavi pulled off an event which was wonderful, enlightening and inspiring." says sup3rkiddo in his post about mukt.in
- "Krish, Atul and Pavitran did a good job on starting with this event. " says Raju aluri in his blog post about Mukt.in
More details of the days at
Mukt.in day 1 ,
Mukt.in day 2 ,
Mukt.in day 3 from our own blogger shriphani !
And pictures are available at
flickr from our own photographer
neenaoffline !
Labels: foss, freedom, Hyderabad, ilughyd, mukt.in, mukthyderabad, muktin, muktv1
Dedicated to krish and Atul
Mukt.in where did the name come from ? It came from
Atul Jha the key organiser of the mukt.in v1 .
Mukt ( मुक्त in hindi , ముక్తి in telugu ) means freedom - A better word then english "free" and is more near to the word "libre"
Yes the event really owes it's presence to
Atul Jha ,without him it would never have happened .
where/ why did I come into mukt.in ?
I organised one LUG meet from JNTU called it JNTULUG and then renamed to JNTUGLUG . That meet was a damn good one ! I really owe this to venu,sowmya,sujana,nishi and keerthi ... withouth them there wouldn'y have been a event .
Then I organised one for my home town Khammam on software freedom day . It was great and I am really indebted to Katta Vijay who had bought volunteers and audience .
One day I organised a 2nd meet for JNTUGLUG where I invited praveen ! The meet was not much of success as there were hardly any audience.
Then one day while I was interning at NRCFOSS ,
Atul Jha calls me up and says that we would organise a event at hyderabad. I really wanted a event for my hometown seeing the way the
ILUGC was working . ILUGC was damn active and I really wanted something at my home LUG ( hyderabad )
Then
atul jha told me that he had a friend called
krish who would help me , That was the moment when krish , me and
atul Jha met on conference calls on cellphone . I still remember the nights on the Chromepet building when we 3 used to discuss the possibilities of organising a event . The venue was finalised to Govt institute of electronics at Marredpally on August 24 24 26 and what's important is
25th is Linus Torvalds birthday !
On 27th July the domain Mukt.in was registered !
guys have a look at these 3 organisers :
Atul Jha at le capital delhi ,
Krish at deccan capital Hyderabad ,
me at South capital Chennai .. and we were supposed to organise a event at hyderabad .
Then we all used to hangout in the channel #mukt.in where NeenaOffline,Shriphani &
sup3rKiddo joined . Sup3rkiddo came all the way from chennai to give a talk and help us . ShriPhani helped us with promotion , though he tried some artwork he was helpful in
writing for us.These were the volunteers of the event , they were behind us supporting us at every moment.
we 3 guys met at a bakery opposite our venue . We sat on the bakery table and started discussing the event drew up a list of things to do .. ( that was great )
Atul Jha,
krish and me definitely remember the meeting and lunch we had with
Raju aluri who was from sun at that time . He was the key speaker for the event .
These were the questions he asked which really are the founding stones of the event
- Are you going to continue with this event ?
- What is going to turn up with this event ?
- Who is going to sponsor the event?
These questions did really bring us to real world !
Then we had this
issue of LUG : Hyderabad suffered from 2
LUG's which we learnt that there is only one
LUG and
Twincling is a registered society which has nothing to do with a
LUG .
ILUGHyderabad the actual LUG of Hyderabad hardly recieves a proper traffic .
Sponsorship Issues : We approached
Sun,
CSC,
NRCFOSS,
CDAC and other companies for sponsorship .
All our sponsorship efforts remained futile cause companies dunno who they are sponsoring .. huh
I being a intern at
NRCFOSS knew atleast why one organisation didn't want to sponsor us .
We also met theju at Vasavi . Theju was a ILUGHyderabad volunteer who understood our issues with
NRCFOSS for getting a sponsorship .
Kenneth Gonasalves thought that IlUG Hyderabad was active , so it should be organising the event .
Let me explain the problem . We ( atleast me ) are organising mukt.in to involve the colleges in and around hyderabad to actively use and contribute to FOSS and revive the dying LUG .
So there was no answer for this !
So how do we
popularise the event ?Me and
Krish went all the way to CBIT to give a poster of mukt.in . We also went to Vasavi as mentioned before on the same trip to promote the event .
Krish took care of banners and GIOE students while I and
atul jha went to a engineering college near Clock tower , secunderabad .. Swami Vivekananda institute of technology .. the nearest engineering college for our venue .
Next stop was Osmania University( CSE dept ) where we gave the poster to a professor whom
Atul Jha thought that .. "yaar yeh to poster nehi lagaayega " and
Atul jha asked the boy to keep the poster in noticeboard. He took some pins and attached them himself (LOL)
You know what happened ? 2 posters were on the notice board of Osmania University and one student from OU bought his CPU for linux installation !
Krish aka
Sri Krishna das was one more man behind the event . He did all the artwork , and he was working for CSC at that time . The website poster was all his effort . He was the allumni of GIOE ,which was the reason we got the venue for the event .
krish and
his bike apache deserve special mention as it was our main transport for the whole event .
krish and me celebrated atul jha's birthday at GIOE gates where
Atul Jha became sentimental .Me and
krish planned the surprise birthday ( it's really hard for the readers to understand , those were our moments -
no sponsorship and a event before us with time approaching us .. )
we always want this event to be free ( both in terms of freedom and free beer ) .
Labels: foss, freedom, Hyderabad, ilug, ilughyd, lug, mukt.in, mukthyderabad, muktin, muktv1
My eee 901 on debian lenny !
I realised that I never blogged about my
eee 901 and
debian installation .
I bought EEE-PC 901 from
Amazon Europe . It came with the default Xandros installation which I am sure would look pretty cool for anyone who hasn't seen / used a GNU/Linux distribution before .
I was happy that everything (camera,sound,bluetooth ) works by default , I was afraid that I would break them if I go for any other installation .
I had two options .
Well I
was a ubuntu user who migrated to debian and was quite content with debian's testing and stable . I choose debian which gave me lenny ( which was in testing at that time ) . I had to download a small image file and write into pen drive .
When I booted with the pen drive .. I was greeted with debian text installation screen .
The whole process was as simple as before . I had installed
GNOME . I was thinking of compiling KDE4 ,but thought that this is not the right box to do such stuff ;)
Went to
kde4 debian's page by
ana and used her binaries ( felt ashamed of myself doing that )
I am kind of stuck up with
old versions :(
Labels: debian.kde4, eeepc
Deleted posts
I hate to admit it , but
I deleted a blog posting of mine .. huh .. that's a bad feeling .
What I did was to express my opinions about a particular issue and a organisation .
Surprisingly it got highly
indexed in
search engines that my posting came up in top 5 not just for the issue but also the organisation , which I seriously hated , man this not the right thing to do if I care about the issue ( felt very bad .. )
Hence I deleted it . Hope the
spider comes back soon !
Labels: bot, google, search, searchengines, seo, spider, yahoo
