Fedora

by Kulbir Saini on BC, Blogroll, Fedora, Fun, Life, Linux

The ultimate feel of freedom

I feel really bad when I have a look at blogroll and there are no new posts. What has happened to the so called blogger batch? Well, after a bit of inspection, I discovered that *they* (including me) have placements. But should you really give up what you like just because right now there is something else which is driving you nuts? These days, I see a lot of people (who were cool till a month ago) under serious stress. People like KBC, Ganja who are talented in every possible way from watching the stuff of the other type ( 😛 ) to studies. But its a matter of one or two sentence(s) to completely break them down. May god help them in interview.

What happened to the senior bloggers? Well, it seems few of them are angry at terrorists and want to refrain from blogging and few others think that writing four lines after forty days is blogging. And few others think that they are not kids anymore. The grown up MS guyz now refuse to blog. And few others are now aliens. Don’t expect to hear from them. Thats all! So no bloggers and hence no posts.

And I feel bad when I say that there are countable people in junior batches who actually blog 🙁 There used to be a fight for being in the top 10 in IIIT Blogroll. But now even if I don’t post for a week, my posts will still be in top 10 🙁 Come on people!! What happened to you all???

You might be wondering about the title of the post. The actual post starts here 😛 I feel this (pre-placement time) is the most awesome time of my stay at IIIT-H. I don’t know why but I am experiencing a feel good factor 😉 No tension, no pressure and then these economic crisis boosting the dollar 😛 Taking everything lighter than I can afford. Suddenly everything looks hollow. The studies, exams, placements everything. But still this is THE busiest time of my stay here. Spending all my time on videocache, intelligentmirror, blogging. More than 25 downloads per day of videocache are pushing me to work on it 🙂 And in this crucial time, all I care about is how fast my Fedora boots 😛

Good luck everyone for the placements. And have fun 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Computers, Fedora, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Life, Linux

How to make a fool of yourself?

  1. Configure your firefox to cache 1GB of data.
  2. Run squid proxy server on your machine in aggressive caching mode by f**cking up with refresh patterns.
  3. Then actually use the above proxy server to browse.

Wasted two hours (5AM – 7AM) in debugging a clean and flawless php script on a remote server with pathetic response time because my firefox+squid messed things up and never requested the actually script from server :((

Still I love caching 😛

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fedora, Fun, Hacking, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Review, Servers, Success

I announce cachevideos.com ( the official guide for caching videos )

I still remember when I launched saini.co.in in November last year. That was my first website that I owned and I came to know about things like hosting, domains and related things. This year, I am proudly launching cachevideos.com, which will act as an official website for my (now) popular squid plugin youtube cache. The website is drupal based and all I have done is populated the content, modified some CSS, installed some modules, themes etc. It took almost 1-2 days for building that website. Drupal is a real cool CMS if you want to build sites quickly. Will write a post about how I build that site sometime. A big thanks to Sambhav Jain for customizing the header image for the website using photoshop. And train loadz of thanks to SMR for providing fu**ing awesome hosting service at g33k.in. Will write a review about the hosting sometime soon.

My addiction for purchasing domain names is growing with time. I currently own 10+ domains just for the heck of it. Wasted (invested?) more than $100 in last one year on purchasing domains. I own the following domains currently.

  1. saini.co.in
  2. fedora.co.in
  3. cachevideos.com
  4. pixomatix.com
  5. fedoraproject.co.in
  6. fedoratube.com
  7. intelligentmirror.org
  8. suse.co.in
  9. cacheyoutube.com
  10. kulbirsaini.com
  11. iiitblogroll.com
  12. iiitbloggers.com

Hopefully I’ll stop purchasing domains and start working on putting content on them 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fedora, Fun, Internet

Getting Crazy

This happens when you intend to do something positive and its result turns out to be entirely negative 😀 I turned on squid proxy authentication on my machine just for the sake of better security. Switched from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. Firefox started checking for updates for extensions and now you can see what happened 🙁

Firefox gone mad due to squid authentication

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Fun, Google, GSOC, Hacking, Success, Victory

Passed GSoC

I have passed my final evaluations for my Google Summer of Code’08 project IntelligentMirror. It was fun and excitement developing the squid plugin. The best thing was I didn’t have to move to a different place or go office for working. Work at home, do what you always wanted to do (open source stuff), talk with people with similar interests(fedora people), get nice payments and have your first project released in open source domain 🙂 That was GSoC.

Another post coming up with detailed GSoC experience 🙂

Have fun,

General Bordeaux 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Google, GSOC, Hacking, LAN, Life, Linux

Whats keeping me busy lately

Previous week was a bit more busier than I actually expected. I wonder why I have to attend a lot of meetings. There were 3-4 of them last week.

Constant complaints about wireless are killing and sometime frustrating. As rishabh pionted out “Become a sysAdmin at IIIT” as a never do thing. I don’t agree completely. But sometimes you get frustrated enough by the complaints and incompetence of your colleagues to say that. Keeping that apart, being a sysAdmin is real fun. You get to play with most critical servers at the place. You learn things that you will never learn in a course or project. (I wonder what we actually learn in a course 😛 One thing I can immediately point out is the attendence management.)

Apart from above, I have been working on IntelligentMirror, my GSOC project and its sister project Youtube Caching using squid. I have achieved 100% youtube caching without altering the refresh patterns in squid. That means your squid will not malfunction and will cache youtube videos successfully and in a browsable fashion 🙂 Going to release version 0.2 very soon. Working on caching Google and metacafe videos as well.

And last but not the least, sleep time has increased from 6-8 hrs to 12-16 hrs/day 😛

PS1 : This is the funniest post, I have ever seen. A must see for MS by research people 😛

PS2 : Also maruti has posted some nice crap 😛

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Fun, Google, GSOC, Hacking, Life, Yum

Sudden affinity for conferences

I never liked to attend any conferences irrespective of the theme and goal of the conference for the past three years. But after attending two-three conferences in recent months and coming across new people with matching interests, I am suddenly looking forward to attend any open source/linux/entrepreneurship conference in hyderabad or nearby cities. BTW, are you planning to attend Eclipse Demo Camp 2008 – Ganymede Edition in Hyderabad on 25th June?

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Fun, Google, GSOC, Internet, Life, Linux

I am fedora’ed

Ever since I joined IIIT, I was getting closer and closer to Fedora. For almost the first two and a half years, I was a user and explorer (not the internet one 😛 ). I learnt to use and hack many things as I kept climbing up. Few months ago, I stepped up one more stair and started participating in development channels (mainly #yum).

Though I was not really developing anything, I was reading the source code and was constantly trying to break things. Whenever I happened break something successfully, I discussed it over the mailing list or irc and get it fixed. It was like a prerequisite to get started with the actual development.

Then my project was accepted for GSOC and I knew that this will really be a huge breakthrough to get started with actual development for open source. I was damn excited as I saw the time coming when I will give back to the open source community.

These days, I am feeling fedora in everything I do. Being a developer, you get surrounded by Fedora too much that you see Fedora everywhere. I use Fedora all the time. Whatever I code get pushed to Fedora Hosted. Whatever I write, again gets reflected at Planet Fedora. I am now addicted to reading blogs from Planet Fedora. They give you a nice place to host open source stuff, as in Fedora People 🙂 You get an email address [kulbirsaini AT fedoraproject DOT org] , which you can show off in your friend circle 😛 And thats all my routine these days.

🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Fedora, Hacking, Internet, Programming, Success, Yum

Accepted for Google Summer of Code

Hi all!

This is my second post of the day but I can’t resit my to write it. I will just say that I am “Accepted For Google Summer of Code”. No its not something propritiery, its “Open Source”. Google Summer of Code is a program sponsored by Google where students write code for Open Source Organizations and Google funds them for the summer.To know more about GSOC, go here.

I submitted my proposal on IntelligentMirror which will be a package for Yum Local Repository Management to Fedora Project. You can browse the breif details of my project here, and for detailed proposal, go here. Seth Vidal, who originally developed Yum, will be mentoring me throughout the project. It will be a wonderful and exciting experience to work with Yum developers.

Adios,

Kulbir Saini aKa General Bordeaux 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Computers, Fedora, Fun, Hacking, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Servers, Yum

Task List this summer

Though almost 25% of vacations are already gone, I thought of writing down my task list this summer. Maybe somebody out there have any suggestions.

  1. Squid Documentation/Tutorials  – Status : DONE
  2. IPTables Tutorial – Status : In progress.
  3. Firewall And Proxy Server Tutorial – Status : Todo
  4. Policy Routing with Linux – Status : Todo
  5. IPRoute2 Howto – Status : Todo
  6. Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control Howto – Status : Todo
  7. IntelligentMirror Development – Status : In progress.

Though I didn’t opt for a project or btp in networks, I am trying to focus on real life networking which I can use to make my life easier with the damn wireless. Like learning squid was a wonderful experience and now I get 25% of the stuff I browse from my own cache 🙂

Happy Summer Vacations,

Bordeaux 😀