Random thoughts and serendipity

Dear Fedora Community Members in India,

A number of you would be aware that we have been working towards a
FUDCon at FOSS.IN. I had recently made a blog post on that note as well.

Today, I would like to share the news that this is a FUDCon that is not
meant to be. Since yesterday evening, certain significant points of
disagreement have come up between the teams working towards FUDCon and
FOSS.IN. As such, in light of those issues, it is best that the FUDCon
is not gone through with at FOSS.IN

I will be getting in touch with the speakers who travel costs have been
sponsored in part or full by The Fedora Project.

FOSS.IN is a leading event and we, at The Fedora Project, wish the event
and the team working tirelessly behind the scenes all the best and
success they so much deserve.

There are positives to everything and the run up to the FUDCon has
brought a small number of wonderful members from the Fedora Community
closer together. They have been planning, coordinating, scheduling and
working like a well oiled machine. That is a great find. And, we will
continue that momentum and harmony.

We have come a long way since The Fedora Project Day at FOSS.IN last
year, and, though we have ambitious dreams for The Fedora Project this
year (and the coming year), we have a fantastic set of people who will
be making that happen.

And, since it is always best to end with a smile - here’s something to
keep you busy : Susmit Shannigrahi is now the proud owner of the largest
set of rare FUDCon swag.

Rock on,

Sankarshan

Read it off the archives if you want.

The news is out and it is official. There is going to be a FUDCon at FOSS.IN and it is on the 28th of November, 2008. If you needed a reason to be there, this is that single reason. Just be there, jam with friends and while you are at it have loads of fun.

A big round of applause to 3 folks who have been working in the background to make this happen. I present - Kushal Das, Rahul Sundaram and Susmit. Together they stitched together the agenda, prodded the speakers, coordinated with the organizers, worked on the swag and of course, made everything look so easy.

The FUDCon will provide ample opportunities to meet up with friends, talk about or hack on a few features, soak in the freedom of a world-class operating system and be a leader. We expect good things out of the event, but we can’t do that without you. Fedora has always been about the community and our awesome trio are putting in place many surprises for the participants of the Fedora community who attend FUDCon.

There will be more blogs, I hope to see some of the speakers blogging about their sessions. And there will be pictures. But all that is when the FUDCon is on. So, go ahead and mark that date on your calendar. And remember to drop in to #fedora-india on irc.freenode.net

Yesterday was somewhat oddly spent.

• Began the day by reading up on Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems (Cooperative Information Systems) and then somehow moved into re-reading Dreaming in Code. And, it all started because I thought of brushing up stuff before I started wrestling with YAWL. Which brings up the lazyweb question - is there a tool/application available that allows me to create workflows using YAWL ? I am not so keen on ‘coding’ the workflows.
• Random conversations led to the book Beautiful Teams. And, it looks like it would be nice to have.
• On a side note, I wonder why is it so difficult for folks to conceive of a business of printing GNU Press books on demand. It has been a long while since there have been talks about it. But nothing has moved forward.
• There is a National Conference on Free Software being held at Cochi around November 15. And, saw this off a flurry of mails on various lists.
• Current favorite picture is here. Check the rest of the photostream too.
• The paper had a snippet of an interview with V Ramesh (CEO, Prabhudas Lilladher Financial Services) who thinks that hotels can provide ‘more meeting rooms‘ to improve services because they would ‘reduce travel time to different locations’. *sigh* ! Why don’t folks talk about rationalizing the WiFi access rates in most hotels. The rates are a massive fail !!
• The paper also had an interview about the RPG Group’s foray into retail. Sanjiv Goenka talking about how the group is planning to spend around 1500 cr (that’s 7 more zeroes) INR in retail. Hmm… he hasn’t been moving about much I’d say. We happen to live close to 4 retail outlets - More (Aditya Birla), Reliance Fresh, BigBazaar (Future Group) and Spencers (RPG) and all of them provide jarring experiences. Barring BigBazaar, none of them have anything resembling parking space. Or, the walk-into-the-store area (and experience) is cramped and congested. Amongst the four, Reliance Fresh seems to have a somewhat better collection of fresh vegetables. However, the stock-out rates of stuff at Reliance is ridiculous which is where BigBazaar kind of beats all of the three hands down. There is rush at all 4 retails stores - and they don’t seem to be eating into each other’s slice of the market. But, they don’t seem to be doing well either. It would be interesting to read more about the ‘retail dream’ and ‘retail experience’ in India. The dream doesn’t seem to be going well now.

মম চিত্তে নিতি নৃত্যে কে যে নাচে
তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ ।
তারি সঙ্গে কী মৃদঙ্গে সদা বাজে
তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ ।।
হাসি কান্না হীরাপান্না দোলে ভালে,
কাঁপে ছন্দে ভালো মন্দ তালে তালে ।
নাচে জন্ম, নাচে মৃত্যু পাছে পাছে
তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ ।
কী আনন্দ, কী আনন্দ, কী আনন্দ,
দিবারাত্রি নাচে মুক্তি, নাচে বন্ধ –
সে তরঙ্গে ছুটি রঙ্গে পাছে পাছে
তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ, তাতা থৈথৈ ।।

It is always a good idea to think about how you would like to be treated before spitting venom on other people.

The list of phones currently being supported by the team working on Mundu does not include a Nokia E71. And, I am denied my daily dose of the radio. Oh ! When will the folks@Mundu come up with a release ? *sigh* I am willing to be a beta tester (and I am that much desperate)

Blog silence interrupted to ponder why college libraries don’t keep copies of Algorithms in a Nutshell+Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Together they would be a good set of books to go through now and then.

My IEEE membership was renewed recently, and, I was wondering what’s the use of continuing with it anyway ? The Pune chapter (which is the local one for me) doesn’t seem to be conducting any events. Contrast that with Bangalore and it is not a good thing.

In fact I was wondering the same about renewal of my ACM membership. *sigh*

A quirky behavior of OpenOffice.org Calc was observed. I uploaded the sample spreadsheet here [link to .ods] .

Would be great to know if someone else can reproduce it.

The first 3 columns have three dates and cell D2 uses the DAYS function to find the difference between the dates. Since the result is accurate, we also put that in cell D4 by-hand. We repeat a similar set of actions for E2 and E4.

Having done that, we divide E2 by D2 and E4 by D4 to obtain the results in F2 and F4. The results in G2 and G4 are obtained by F2 by 15 and F4 by 15 respectively. The contents of G6 are input by-hand.

For the cells H2, H4 and H6, the data is input by hand and I2, I4 and I6 are obtained by multiplying H2, H4 and H6 by G2, G4 and G6 respectively. Check the results obtained

All of the above would be obvious if you check the formula bits in the spreadsheet.

The real fun of course is in the remaining rows. G8 is obtained as a result of the expression F8*15 (note: G2 was 15*F2) which is somewhat different and thus we end up with different results on I8.

Check out the spreadsheet. It is fun. The OO.o issuezilla does not seem to work for me, so shall file a bug later.

• My last blog post has had a surge of comments. Good to know. It hasn’t done what I was expecting it to do. And, frankly, I don’t think there would be GNOME-y stuff happening at FOSS.IN this year. I would have loved to see some Performance Testing stuff and bits of GNOME Mobile. So, either those folks are talking off-list and submitting proposals or, they don’t intend to turn up. So much for a few mails that I received gushing about ‘doing GNOME‘ at the event. Stop gushing and start doing is something I should make into a signature.
• I started using duplicity to back up stuff. Wonderful piece of software and a nifty utility. Thanks to Rahul/mether for pointing that out to me. Being the GUI weenie that I am, it would be wonderful to have a GUI wrapped around it.
• FOSS.IN this year would perhaps be less of a ‘conference’ and more of a ’summit’+'WorkOut’. In case, you are presenting or intending to talk about stuff at the event, please take care to give your slides some love. Presenting doesn’t really mean that you would [i] be reading huge chunks of text off the slides or, [ii] be deviating from the slide content into something orthogonal. I saw both of that happening. The presentation/talk is a story and it would be good to spend some time during the run-up to the event to practise narrating without the slides. Lots of things can happen and thus, preparing an interesting narration isn’t a bad idea.
• Interesting proposals for WorkOuts and Project of The Day being discussed on various project mailing lists and IRC channels. To be part of them, hop on to the nearest friendly IRC channel (#fedora-india, for example) and start participating.
• Wrapped up reading An Indian Odyssey - quick read and a good one too.
• This article (from the Online WSJ) kind of sums up the situation around ICICI for a quick read. The television media coverage related to ICICI has been all-over-the-park. Half baked statements, grapevine gossip being palmed off as ‘breaking news’ and a steady attempt to sensationalize the facts without an underlying comprehension. Senior media personnel haven’t been performing up to the mark. The global meltdown and the unheard-of-before statements from various world leaders would eventually walk their way to India. However, it isn’t an excuse for the private media channels to go all out and start adding rumors to the dismay of already shaky indices.
• To all those who have contributed to the page on Subprime mortgage crisis - a round of thanks for keeping the English simple and easily understood.
• If you have missed it earlier, don’t forget to take a look at the EKG Reports.