AssaultCube is a multi-player game based on the free and open source cube engine but some of the media assets are non-free and hence the game is available in the RPM Fusion non-free repository for Rawhide and Fedora 19 (updates-testing repo for now).

This was my first RPM Fusion package and it was a smooth ride since much of RPM Fusion infrastructure resembles Fedora Extras including the plague buildsystem, cvsextras branch and so on.  Thanks to folks reviewing the package and setting up cvs and other things necessary to complete this task.  I have another package, subtitleripper already waiting on review and I hope to contribute more as time permits. 

WFS-india is a volunteered organization created by some intelligent and innovative minds like: Satabdi Das (A OPW- Gnome intern and FOSS enthusiast) few months ago. The main motto of this organization is to create awareness among women towards free and open source software in India  For this , they have started conducting meetings on #wfs-india channel on freenode server in order to plan an event for increasing participation of women in free and open source software movement. In a short span of time, finally they decided to organize an event named “Localization Hackathon” on the eve of cultural freedom day on 20th may, 2013 from 08:00 p:m to 09:30 p:m at wfs-india channel on freenode server.

The whole event is supported by Mozilla, Fedora and Videolan (The creater of VLC Media Player). This event provides two reasons to join it and hack while learning. First is “Want to see your name the next time anybody installs fedora, Mozilla and VLC Media Player?” and the second one is “Want to add some special skills to your resume?”. The whole session of Localization Hackathon is started by me and finally backened by Biraj karmakar and Runa Bhattacharjee. We have got seven participants across the globe <holingpoon, erry, sunu, Anupam, shweta, anexasajoop, sri_c>. The more details about the participants are given below in the chat list. The guest persons who are helping backend are Amani_glugcal, kaustavdm, Priyankanag. The whole event is coordinated by Satabdi Das.

The hackathon starts with a formal introduction of all the participants followed by a simple question “Why do you want to contribute to foss?”. The above question extends and arouse a new question, “if i donot know programming, how will i contribute?”. After that we explained the definition of localization followed by internationalization and related mother tongue with software localization. From there, we have taken the help of Transifex and mozilla pootle server to get started with localization of mozilla, Fedora and vlc media player. All the participants have created their account on pootle server and transifex also. Erry found his language 100% completed in mozilla so she switched to VLC and there she found that greek is not available for VLC, so he requested for the creation of new language. Sri_c has successfully joined on kannada language team on mozilla pootle server and for VLC on transifex. sunu has started for oriya localization, so he contacted the videolan language co-ordinator in order to get approved and he joined oriya localization team on transifex.Holingpoon is successfully registered on mozilla pootle server. But during loging she is getting 500 internal server error from mozilla pootle server. I request mozilla to please sort out this problem. Each one has got their tool to translate. from that people actually entered into the field from where they start translating. Biraj is helping the Bangla people to get into the translation.From there people understand what they have to do for software localization. Due to very short span of time and after facing lots of problem, this hackathon has ended by 09:30 p:m. Due to that we have chosen to take input from Google transliterate but found that i doesnot support some scripts of various languages like: oriya.
The output of the hackathon are as follows:

1. in a short span of time, people get charged and comes forward to support wfs-india.
2. People actually learnt what localization is and how to get started in any language by using transifex and pootle server.
3.  On founding any problem during localization, they can contact to language co-rodinator through mailing lists.
4. faces some problems during hackathon on pootle server needs to short out.
5. more things on localization will be introduced in the upcoming event.

Following features needs to be added in the pootle server:

1.  Test the working of mozilla locamotion on al different available browsers.
2. Show language code against the language name.
3. creation of help desk to solve problem quickly if any problem occurred during hackathon.
4. Sometimes the pootle translation page does not responds- it needs to be fixed.
5. porting all translations of mozilla projects to locamotion for easy translation.

And lastly , the event was successful to some extent as we have expected. I would like to thanks all people like: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay and Rajesh Ranjan who have directly or indirectly supported us in successful completion of the hackathon. A special thanks to Mozilla Locamotion and Transifex Developers.

Some important links:

•  IRC Chat Logs: http://fpaste.org/13234/
• Mozilla Event Page: https://reps.mozilla.org/e/localization-hackathon-wfs-india/#
• Public Event Page: http://wfs-india.github.io/#/step-1
• getting started: http://ciypro.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/localization-hackathon-get-started/

* હવે થોડા દિવસ કવિન વેકેશનમાં ગુજારશે (એટલે કે ગામડાનાં ક્લિન વાતાવરણમાં), ધૂળમાં મસ્તી કાઢશે અને આજુ-બાજુનાં લોકોને હેરાન કરશે. મારું નાનકડું વેકેશન પણ આવશે, અત્યારે તો એવું લાગે છે કે વેકેશનમાંય મિટિંગોની ભરમાર હશે (રીલીઝ et al).

* વર્ષો પછી મુંબઇના વાતાવરણમાં ટુ-વ્હીલર પર લાંબી મુસાફરી કરી અને થયું કે ધન્ય છે તેમને જે દરરોજ આવા પ્રદૂષણ જોડે પનારો પાડતા હશે. આપણું તો કામ જ નહી. એક નિરીક્ષણ: દર ત્રણ દુકાને હવે એક દુકાન મોબાઇલની દેખાય છે.

* ફાઇનલી, ઇન્ટરનેટ (એટલે કે સારું ઇન્ટરનેટ) આવી ગયું છે. મારી પાસે હવે ૩ વાઇ-ફાઇ રાઉટર્સ ભેગા થઇ ગયા છે! તેમનું શું કરવું એ એક બીજો વિકટ પ્રશ્ન છે.

* મુંબઇમાં પાંચ કિલોમીટર દોડવું એ બેંગ્લોરનાં દસ કિલોમીટર બરાબર થાય (એટલે કે સરખો થાક લાગે – ભેજ અને ગરમીને કારણે). જોકે હજી સુધી બાહ્ય રસ્તાઓ પર પ્રયત્નો કર્યા નથી. કાલે એક ટેસ્ટ લેવામાં આવશે.

* છેલ્લા અપડેટ્સમાંથી અપડેટ: જુહુ ન જવાયું!

Women in Free Software India is organizing an online Localization Hackathon for women on Monday 20 May 2013 that is Cultural Freedom Day. Our goal is to include more women in Free and Open Source Software.This event will be good for anyone new or not yet aware of FOSS and it doesn’t require any programming experience. Please join us from 8pm to 9pm tomorrow at #wfs-india channel on http://webchat.freenode.net/ to participate.

Here’s a cool introduction page for the event which you may share along with the poster – http://wfs-india.github.io/

Wrote about KARNATAKA : ELECTRONIC SYSTEM DESIGN & MANUFACTURING POLICY at PuneChips. Please check the blog post here.

The post KARNATAKA : ELECTRONIC SYSTEM DESIGN & MANUFACTURING POLICY appeared first on #chetanpatil.

The Wayback Machine reveals that 20May2004 was the first time it crawled http://planet-india.randomink.org/ It has been nine years of making friends, crowd-surfing, reading about stuff folks are up to, life hacks and so much more. There’s not much to say other than “keep writing!” I know of a number of folks who like what they read and help out by pointing out new feeds which need to be aggregated.

dnf, the experimental fork of yum was introduced in Fedora 18.  Under the hood, dnf uses the libsolv library from openSUSE (also used by Zypper) and aims for near 100% compatibility with yum.  Nearly all command line options are the same and instead of /etc/yum.conf, it uses /etc/dnf.conf but the configuration options are not changed. dnf is parallel installable along side yum (yum install dnf) and the plan (30:05) is to make it the new yum only by Fedora 22 so you have ample time to participate.

I have setup a bash alias (alias yum=’sudo dnf’ in ~.bashrc and source ~/.bashrc) in my system that pretends that dnf is yum so that I don’t have to throw away my muscle memory.  In the course of the last several months, I have filed over a dozen  bug reports and new feature requests (mostly to bring dnf in line with what yum already supports) and the core dnf (especially in Fedora 19) is usable (with the exception of one weird bug) and  the performance is much better compared to yum.  There are quite a few nice features missing however.  This includes support for Delta RPM,  history undo, parallel downloads,  auto-remove, bash completion and several group commands.

Try it out and report any bugs.

We have all been hearing the recent anguish of the victims of the 1984 riots who were once again denied justice. Somehow, the rules of jurisprudence in India seem to provide coverage only to the high-and-mighty, or maybe only to the ruling party of the time. As the Supreme Court itself has said, any prosecutorial organisation like the CBI seems to be hopelessly tarnished: They seem to be the leashed dogs of the party in power.

In this context, someone whom I had never heard of before wrote this searing editorial in the Hindustan Times of 18th May: http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/gopalkrishnagandhi/When-a-part-of-you-dies/Article1-1061810.aspx . I cannot tell to what extent I sympathise with this author whom I had not heard of before.

Please read that article: It is the Gandhi of the times of the infinite madnesses of the Partition,coming back from Bengal to address Congress leaders in Bihar. To take a digression, Gandhiji is *not* by any means my favourite politician, and I hate many of his ways. Nevertheless, to read about his walks through the galis of Noakhali and to understand that a half-naked fakir (incidentally, fuck you Winston Churchill, and the British fucking bulldog) managed to do in Bengal what the entire might of the British/Indian/Pakistani army could not mange in Punjab, is sobering. Walk one day in his chappals before you feel entitled to criticise him.

To come back to to Mr. GopalKrishna’s point, Gandhi in his address charges Congress leaders with this exact point: “…An old woman, 110 years old, was butchered in front of you. Why are *you* alive?” This is a question that should redound down the ages: Our Sikh prime minister himself begs forgiveness for 1984, yet people of his own party seem to be given a free pass for murder. And, by the same token they cannot challenge worse murderers in Gujarat, kyon ki hamaara bhi naam kharab ho jaayega,

I though that maybe the ghost of Gandhi would rise up from his grave demanding yet again, “Why are you alive?” to people like Manmohan Singh. It is should be doubly ironical that seventy years later, he still seems to be addressing people of his own Congress party. The even more sobering realisation is for each of us. If, and sadly when (given existing religious, sectarian, what-have-you tensions in India) will *you* be prepared? At that time, there are likely to be very few people standing by your side. Nevertheless, at least one should never have to answer to the justified wrath of a Gandhiji demanding: “आप ज़िन्दा क्यों हो”. Death before dishonour.

After hearing about Android Studio via Google I/O 2013, I have been toying around with underlying software called  IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition which is a pretty sweet free and open source (Apache v2 licensed)  IDE. IDEA was for packaged for a while in Fedora but has been retired unfortunately. Oddly no other linux distribution seems to be packaging it either. So I was trying to figure out how much work it is to revive it. Fedora git still has the old spec files and patches as part of its history. fedpkg clone intellij-idea and figure out the last useful git commit before it was retired via git log and make git point to that via git reset –hard e366b11. Clone the upstream git repo for IDEA and do a quick and dirty build and bingo!

Well… not quite.  Fixing the spec and associated patches etc  to build the latest version and follow the Fedora packaging guidelines would take a lot more work but one of the things that was bugging me was something that started out as a trivial thing yet turned to be a surprising problem.  The icon shown in alt+tab window was blurry. Looked around for a high resolution variant of the same icon and shoved it into hicolor icon theme directory and ran gtk-update-icon-cache only to realize that the GNOME Shell overview is showing a different icon from the one in alt+tab. Head over #fedora-desktop channel and talked to Matthias Clasen, adamw and Kalev and fiddled with a few different settings and still no go.

Read up on how GNOME Shell does the window matching and realize that this is a long standing problem with Java applications. Java sets the WM_CLASS based on the name of the class running the Swing main loop and there is no real Java API to reset it and since many applications can have the same classname, this confuses several desktop environments and window managers. A bug report has been open since early 2007 and I have filed one against Fedora openJDK in addition to the one on poor font rendering, hoping to see some progress on these issues.  Some folks have even developed elaborate hacks to fix the problem but atleast for GNOME Shell, all it took was to run sleep 5; xprop | grep WM_CLASS | awk ‘{print $4}’ and click on the IDEA window which reveals the class name as “jetbrains-idea”. If you rename the desktop file to match the classname (jetbrains-idea.desktop), GNOME Shell is able to pick up the right icon specified in the desktop file regardless of what the name or generic name is.  One can set the latter two to something appropriate like IntelliJ IDEA and GNOME Shell overview and alt+tab window would show that instead. Funky!

Mozilla brings power of the web into ordinary people's hands. Every day I spend countless hours working with volunteer communities around the world to translate Firefox web browser. Reading Sudheesh Singanamalla's blog post about his encounter with a farmer in rural India was such a touching experience.

A Localization journey - A Farmer's tale - A Delightful Experience

It was on my way back in a cramped out bus, travelling researching about language changes and variations within the state of Andhra Pradesh, that I sat next to a man, quite old.

Me : What do you use in the internet? How do you talk to your son?
Old man: I go to Rajat's Net Cafe nearby by house and then talk from there on Google (meant Google+)
Me : Do you know how to read English and understand which button to click and so on?
Old man : Oh, i don't know English, but i use it in Telugu. The shop guy Rajat has seen me since he was small, so after my son went to Delhi, he separately bought a Telugu keyboard so that i can be using the keyboard.
Me: Okay, but then how do you read the information on the computer screen? Isn't that in English?
Old man : (Laughs) Don't you know, there is this software something called Firefox, it is in Telugu.
Me : Really? Can you tell me how the software looks?
Old man : You should know more, you're an engineering student but if you ask i'll tell you, its a small thing like this earth picture but a small cat , orange in colour is holding it.
Me: (smiling crazily) You know how to use it in Telugu?
Old man : Yeah, its not hard, I know how to read Telugu and also know how to use mouse, so clicking gets me the job done.
 

Here is an inexpensive Ubuntu notebook, the ASUS X201E-DH01.

• Intel Celeron 847 (1.1GHz) Sandy Bridge
• 4 GB DDR3
• 320 GB 5400 rpm Hard Drive
• 11.6-Inch Screen, Intel GMA HD Graphic card
• 1 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0
• SD MMC Card Reader
• WiFi, Ethernet and Bluetooth 4.0
• 1 HDMI and 1 VGA
• 5 Hours claimed battery life.
• Light Weight: 1.3 Kgs (2.9 Pounds)
• Ubuntu 12.04 preinstalled!

It is not the fastest PC around, but enough for day to day tasks. Runs faster on Ubuntu than Windows. Is light weight for people on the move, inexpensive and has enough of ports.

Related posts:

1. Chromebook opens a new category Just when you thought, notebooks were dead and tablets where...
2. Asus Cube looks interesting Asus Cube (was earlier Qube), looks like an interesting device....
3. 10 reasons to choose Ubuntu 12.10 over Windows 8 From PC World. Ubuntu is a widely popular open-source Linux...

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There was never a time I had belief of religion, even in my memory. But I had to face this question ‘are you a Muslim’ many times. The tone of those questions were unbelievable mixed with wonder. Many Hindu friends who live and dress like me never had to face questions like ‘Oh! You are like this even when you are a Hindu’. Until some time ago I never wanted to answer yes or no. I used to ask back why do you look at caste and religion. To be exact, till 2008. From that year, I started changing answer to that question.

വിശ്വാസമോ മതമോ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്ന ഒരു കാലം എന്റെ ഓര്‍മയില്‍ പോലും ഇല്ല. പക്ഷെ നിങ്ങള്‍ മുസ്ലീം ആണോ എന്ന ചോദ്യം ഞാന്‍ പലപ്പോഴും നേരിടേണ്ടി വന്നിട്ടുണ്ട്. ഒരു തരം ‘അവിശ്വസനീയത കലര്‍ന്ന അത്ഭുതമായിരുന്നു ആ ചോദ്യങ്ങളുടെ ടോണ്‍. എന്നെ പോലെ ഒക്കെ വസ്ത്രം ധരിക്കുകയോ ജീവിക്കുകയോ ഒക്കെ ചെയ്യുന്ന ഹിന്ദു സുഹൃതുക്കള്‍ക്കാകട്ടെ ‘ഓ ! നിങ്ങള്‍ ഹിന്ദു ആണോ എന്നിട്ടും നിങ്ങള്‍ ഇങ്ങനെ ഒക്കെ ആയിരിക്കുന്നല്ലോ’ എന്ന ചോദ്യം ഒരിക്കലും നേരിടേണ്ടി വരാറുമില്ല. കുറച്ചു കാലം മുന്‍പ് വരെ, മുസ്ലീം ആണോ എന്ന ചോദ്യത്തോട് അതെ, എന്നോ അല്ല എന്നോ പറയാന്‍ ഞാന്‍ താല്പര്യപ്പെട്ടിരുന്നില്ല. എന്തിനാണ് നിങ്ങള്‍ ജാതിയും മതവും നോക്കുന്നത് എന്ന് തിരിച്ചു ചോദിക്കുകയായിരുന്നു ഞാന്‍ ചെയ്തിരുന്നത്. കൃത്യമായി പറഞ്ഞാല്‍ 2008 വരെ. ആ വര്‍ഷം മുതലാണ്‌ ആ ചോദ്യത്തിന്റെ ഉത്തരം ഞാന്‍ മാറ്റി പറയാന്‍ തുടങ്ങിയത്.

In that year I got into many problems after Indian Mujahidin used an article I wrote for The Hoot portal in a letter send to media after taking responsibility for Delhi bomb blasts (I never understood, then or even now, who or what this India Mujahidin is. They may be terrorists, as Justice Katju said, may be paid media, may be even IB. Whoever that is I realised then that they are somewhere near. To know that in person is a terrifying experience. I have written that in FEC.). I met then minister of state for home Shri Prakash Jaiswal’s secretary, knowing I would be questioned by Maharashtra anti terror squad and wanting to prove my innocence. After reading my written complaint (about my article being misused), his first question was that. “ARE YOU A MUSLIM “?

ഡല്‍ഹി സ്ഫോടനത്തിന്റെ ഉത്തരവാദിത്തം ഏറ്റെടുത്തു കൊണ്ട് ഇന്ത്യന്‍ മുജാഹെദീന്‍ എന്ന സംഘടന മാധ്യമങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് അയച്ച കത്തില്‍, ദി ഹൂട്ട് എന്ന പോര്‍ട്ടലില്‍ ഞാന്‍ എഴുതിയ ഒരു ലേഖനം ഉപയോഗിക്കപ്പെടുകയും തുടര്‍ന്ന് ഞാന്‍ വലിയ പ്രശ്നങ്ങളില്‍ അകപ്പെടുകയും ചെയ്തത് ആ വര്‍ഷമാണ്‌. (ഈ ഇന്ത്യന്‍ മുജാഹിദീന്‍ ആരാണെന്നും എന്താണെന്നും അന്നും ഇന്നും എനിക്ക് മനസ്സിലായിട്ടില്ല. അവര്‍ ചിലപ്പോള്‍ ഭീകരവാദികള്‍ ആവാം, ജസ്റ്റിസ്‌ കട്ജു പറഞ്ഞത് പോലെ paid media ആവാം, അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ഐ ബി തന്നെയാവാം. ആരായാലും അവര്‍ നമ്മുടെ തൊട്ടടുത്ത്‌ എവിടെയോ ഉണ്ട് എന്ന് അന്നെനിക്ക് മനസ്സിലായി. അത് നേരിട്ട് അറിയുക എന്നത് വിറങ്ങലിപ്പിക്കുന്ന ഒരു അനുഭവം ആണ്. എഫ് ഇ സിയില്‍ ഞാന്‍ അത് എഴുതിയിട്ടുണ്ട്). മഹാരാഷ്ട്ര ആന്റി ടെറര്‍ സ്ക്വാഡ് എന്നെ ചോദ്യം ചെയ്തേക്കും എന്നറിഞ്ഞു, എന്റെ നിരപരാധിത്വം ബോധ്യപ്പെടുത്താനായി, അന്നത്തെ ആഭ്യന്തര സഹമന്ത്രിയായിരുന്ന ‘ശ്രീ പ്രകാശ്‌ ജൈസ്വാളിന്റെ സെക്രടറിയെ ഞാന്‍ പോയി കണ്ടു. ഞാന്‍ എഴുതി തയ്യാറക്കിയ പരാതി (എന്റെ ലേഖനം ദുരുപയോഗം ചെയ്യപ്പെട്ടതിനെ കുറിച്ച്) വായിച്ചു നോക്കിയതിനു ശേഷം അദേഹത്തിന്റെ ആദ്യത്തെ ചോദ്യം അതായിരുന്നു. “ARE YOU A MUSLIM “?

Even though I knew saying no or I don’t practice any religion would make me safer, that time I wanted to say yes. So my confusion towards that question came to an end that day. That time I felt, saying no or I’m not a believer would amount to betraying thousands of innocent Muslims. Again after two years, when the same question came to me as a ‘curtain raiser’ for Karnataka Police’s interrogation, I didn’t have to think at all to say yes.

അല്ല എന്നോ, ഞാന്‍ ഒരു മതവും പ്രാക്ടീസ് ചെയ്യുന്നില്ല എന്നോ ഒക്കെ ഉള്ള ഉത്തരങ്ങള്‍ ഒരു പക്ഷെ എന്നെ കൂടുതല്‍ സേഫ് ആക്കിയെക്കും എന്നറിയാമായിരുന്നെങ്കിലും അപ്പോള്‍ എനിക്ക് അതെ എന്ന് പറയാനാണ് തോന്നിയത്. അങ്ങനെ ആ ചോദ്യത്തോടുള്ള എന്റെ സന്ദേഹം അന്നവസാനിച്ചു. അല്ല എന്നോ ‘ഞാന്‍ വിശ്വാസിയല്ല’ എന്നോ ഒക്കെ പറയുന്നത്, നിരപരാധികളായ ആയിരക്കണക്കിന് മുസ്ലീങ്ങളെ ഒറ്റികൊടുക്കുന്നത് പോലെയാവും എന്നാണ് എനിക്കപ്പോള്‍ തോന്നിയത്. പിന്നെയും രണ്ടു വര്‍ഷത്തിനു ശേഷം കര്‍ണാടക പോലീസിന്റെ ഇന്റെരൊഗെഷന്റെ ‘കര്‍റ്റന്‍ റൈസര്‍’ ആയി ഒരിക്കല്‍ കൂടി ഈ ചോദ്യം എന്റെ നേരെ വന്നപ്പോള്‍ അതെ എന്ന് പറയാന്‍ എനിക്ക് ഒട്ടും ആലോചിക്കേണ്ടി വന്നില്ല.

– Shahina KK/ഷാഹിന കെകെ

* I am a Muslim, not a terrorist

* Taken from an email sent to an online discussion group Fourth Estate Critique (FEC)

[Previous installments on Nested Virtualization with KVM and Intel.]

This is part of some recent testing that I’ve been doing with upstream KVM (for 3.10.1). The threads linked here has initial tests bench-marking kernel compile (with make defconfig, a default config file) times in L2. And some minimal guestfish appliance start-up timings in L1.

Some details:

• Setup information to test with VMCS (Virtual Machine Control Structure) Shadowing. In brief, VMCS Shadowing — a processor specific feature — as described upstream, can reduce the overhead of nested virtualization by reducing the number of VMExits from L1 to L0.
• Simple scripts used to create L1 and L2.
• Libvirt XMLs of L1, L2 guests, for reference.

The gritty details of reasons for VMExits are described in Intel architecture manuals, Volume 3b, APPENDIX 1.