An evening well spent – BOSUG meet

Hello folks, BOSUG met after a long time and I went for the meet, again at Sun offices Bangalore. It was again an interesting evening, well spent, learning lots of new things. Moinak and Anil spoke on interesting things that held my attention all through the evening.

My first BOSUG meet

Hello folks, I attended my first BOSUG meet last Saturday(13th June, 2009) at the Sun office(Divyashree chambers).  Though the turnout was less, it was really a nice meeting and learnt quite a bit. And of course had the chance to attend the session of Max Bruning and had a chat with Moinak.

The “vi” nightmare

I have been having a nightmare for the past few days, since I got an account created for me in one of our company’s local server. The trouble is that the server running a nice operating system has only “vi”.  I really don’t know why when every other server has both vi and emacsAnd for someone who is used to emacs alone for the past few years(about 3 to 4 years ), moving to vi is a great nightmare. And the fact that it has no other editors, not even nano or pico is really troubling me. I often end up pressing Ctrl+e or Ctrl+A and something wierd happens.

And since it is not even vim, but plain old vi, it has made me start a frantic serach for possible ways of using vi with emacs key combinations. Any help from anyone ?

Py3k looks like a new language

    Hi folks, another long gap. I had been trying to work with Py3k, but in vain. I had not updated myself even to Python 2.6, when I read about the release of RC1 for python 3.0(Py3k), and its documentation I was totally stunned to know that everything right from the basic “print” statement to the use of strings has changed. When I weent through the “What’s new”, I just understod that my knowledge has been just repositioned to 0(Though I need to agree that it was always close to zero ).

      Looking at all these, I am certain that all my previous code will shout hundreds of errors when I use the python3.0 interpreter with those code. Also, I had the habit of working with the python interpreter shell for quick needs. And now am getting errors very very frequesntly with that. Though I had been reading about the huge changes between the 2.x versions and the (then)impending 3.0 version for the past few months, I didn’t realise how grave it was until I started using the new version.

    Luckily, they have a converter that will convert code from the 2.6 version to the Py3k. And it seems they had made 2.6 with an hint of the appraoching storm. So, I think the best way to convert any old 2.x code of mine,  that I might want to use, to 3.0 is to convert the code to 2.6 first and then to 3.0 using the converter.

 

     Oh God, I think I have a new language to learn before I can say “I know something in Python”.

Page up and Page down patented – by Microsoft :(

Hello folks!! When I logged into Gmail today, the first mail I read was the slashdot subscription and it had the news that M$ has got a patent for the Page up and the Page down keys of the keyboard. Now, if this continues, I think in a few years(Or even months, who knows), M$ will apply for (and may even get) patents to things like booting the PC, login process and even for every keystroke/mouse click that is made. I dont know where this ugly greed for patents will end. For those who had not read the news, here is the link

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/31/2224217

At least now I think users of PC will realise how bad a company M$ is and the threat that it poses to the world.

Google App Engine

Hello folks, Now more from google. Google has released a new service called the Google App Engine. Google App Engine is a service that lets us run our web applications on goolge’s infrastructure. So, we can be free from tasks setting up and maintaining servers for our apps, i.e we will be able concentrate more on our apps than on the underlying support systems. Moreover, the app engine provides a dynamic load balancing environment, supporting nearly 5 million hits a month for an application. Initially, as it is a trial run, 500 MB of space is given (all accounts are free now) and once the full version is released, additional space can be purchased.

What is more is that, the app engine presently supports only the Python programming language. This goes on to tell how popular python is and how important it is as well. The app engine currently supports all features of python (system independent) and apart from that it supports the popular python web-framework – Django.    Since a sandbox kind of environment is given,  the environment is secure and only limited access id provided to the underlying OS. The App Engine also provides a non-relational datasotre that acts as the back end. But it comes with a powerful query engine and transaction support.

More can be known about this from the official google site http://code.google.com/appengine/

Google’s Code University

Hello folks,  Though I came to know of this very late, I thought it would be useful to post it. Google has yet again done what it, can to spread knowledge. It has a “Code University” or a place in the web, where anyone can access lecture notes, assignments and reference materials for any topic related  to computer science. These have been contribute from various universities across the globe. This apart, it has a few video tutorials as well. It seems to be really useful. All the lecture notes are in the form of presentations( ppt, unfortunately. Many university prof. still go for MS office it seems. ) The link to the site is

http://code.google.com/edu

FossConf ‘08 @ MIT,Chennai

       Hello folks, It was an wonderful weekend at Chennai. ILUGC, NRC-FOSS and others organised the first FossConf ‘08 at the Madras Institute of Technology, Chrompet, Chennai. The event started on February 1st and concluded on 3rd. It had demo stalls with tool and project demos and then sessions on various topics.

Myself, Ashok and Vins participated in the event and had the opportunity to attend a few sessions. We had put up a demo stall as well. Initially it was on “Networking” where we explained stuff on DNS, Proxy server etc. Then, on seeing that the crowd that came there needed more basic stuff, we renamed the stall as “GNU/Linux basics”. We handled the stall only for a couple of hours that day and went to attend sessions. First, we attended the session on Djanjo handled by Mr. Ponnusamy. But unfortunately, for me, the session was not impressive; I dont really know why. Then, we attended a session on “PHP attack and defenses” which was handled by Mr.Bala Vignesh from Lucas TVS. It was really interesting as he spoke on code injection, sql injection, XSS and remote execution. The session was followed by an interesting argument between the participants.

Then on the final day of the event, we attended two more sessions, one on parallel programming and the other on ruby basics. We were also present for the session on KDE 4.0 by Mr.Pavithran, but didn’t sit for the entire session. On the whole, the sessions were really nice. But, I still don’t get the difference between python and Ruby as both of them seem to be same from what we all learnt in that Ruby introduction session.

For the concluding session, we had a surprise guest, Mr. Brian Behlendorf, the founder of the Apache foundation. He gave a wonderful talk on how open source tools are in fields other than Operating systems, Servers and web browsers. He gave a few examples as well like opens source academic content preparations tool, and opensource tool for editing video content of the wikipedia etc. He also mentioned how open source can get into the field of medicine by creating collaborative tools.

The closing day also had an open-to-all-participants quiz conducted by Mr.Ramdoss amachu and another guy.  Those who answered correct were rewarded with a Ubuntu pen. The grand moment was when our college won the prize for the best tool demo. Also, GLUGOT’s contribution was spoken about were highly and more is being expected from it.

The only disappointment that we had there was that a few stalls that we had planned to attend got canceled due to some unavoidable reasons or overlapped with other sessions . Else, we would have attended sessions like iptables and web 2.0 optimization.

We also found time to go to the City Center. There we had our friend Venkatesh waiting for us with his nephew. We spent some good time there eating some stuff and then taking a few snaps (with my digicam) with him.

Finally, a great many thanks to Ashok and his aunt’s family for the three of us stayed there. We had some really nice food cooked for us on all three days. It really saved us from looking for some boarding and lodgings elsewhere.

Sun acquires MySQL

Hello folks, some hot news from opensource world. Just got the news from Slashdot that Sun Microsystems has acquired MySQL, the famed FOSS GPLed database. And to confirm it, visited the MySQL website and a few blogs at blogs.sun.com . So, to the best of my knowledge this is the biggest acquisition in the open source world. MySQL is the world’s fastest growing database being used by everyone from the Internet giants Google and Yahoo. The acquisition is valued at $1 billion totally. Though, Sun + MySQL will be a greater force than MySQL alone – Sun’s great engineers will support the development-, I have a few questions that come to my mind:

1) Will MySQL continue to be licensed under GPL or will it be CDDL

2) Will there be any “non-open source” sun contributed parts added to its code base.

Linux Mint – The distro for those moving from windows

       Hi folks, Got something interesting this time. Bought this month’s Linux For You a bit late. Anyway, now that i have bought it, saw the media that came with it this time. One was a CD with software related to electronics etc. The other was a Live CD, based on Ubuntu. It was named Linux mint. I am not sure if I had been ignorant or if it was a relatively new distro, I had never heard that name. As it was a live CD, I was eager to try it out.