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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 Fun, Google, Internet, Review, Tips n Tricks

Mouse gestures in Gmail

Did you checkout the gmail labs thingy on the settings page in gmail? They have introduced many features to enhance the email experience.  One of the features is mouse gestures which looks pretty cool and makes browsing in between mails very easy 🙂 To enable, go to setting page in Gmail and then to Labs tab in there and enable ‘Mouse Gestures’. Now go to any of the email folder. Open a message. Right click and hold. Now moving your mouse to left will take you to the next message in folder. Similarly, moving the mouse to right will take you to the previous message and moving the mouse upwards will take you back to the folder 😀 Thats just awesome. Hopefully this will save some of my time while browsing the all time flooded gsoc list 🙂

Here is a pic of the gesture.

Gmail Mouse Gestures

Here is a video as well 🙂

PS : I didn’t even realize that the previous post was my 50th post 😀

 
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 Computers, Google, GSOC, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Yum

Recent Happenings

  1. Entire wifi was down for almost two hours today. Emergency situation. I called whoever I could but just wasted time and money. Wifi admin would have felt totally surprised after getting 25-30 missed calls from my number 😛 Pinged back after an hour and things were back in tune. Thank god!!
  2. Celebrated Yum Bug Day today. We fixed and closed a lot of bugs. Was a very good experience.
  3. GSOC project is going fine.
  4. IntelligentMirror is now hosted on fedorahosted.org 🙂 Checkout the source code here.
  5. Hooked to Gossip Girls 🙂
  6. Playing cricket at 6AM after night out is now becoming a habit. Will post about it sometime 🙂
  7. Duration and frequency of BC sessions is on the rise. OBH really rocks 🙂
  8. Intake of caffeine is on the rise as well. Thanks to OBH coffee machine 🙂
  9. Chatting a lot these days. Don’t ask why ? 😛
  10. Blogged a lot this month 🙂

🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Google, GSOC, Life, Programming

The first gift from Google

People were wondering about my status messages on GTalk for a few days. It took around a week to ship things. Well, finally I have recieved the first gift from Google as a part of Google Summer of Code Program. Its a beautiful book named “Beautiful Code”. For more information about the book, click here and here. A brief description of the book

How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project’s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.

Though I don’t like books pretty much, I am looking forward to read it out of excitement and due to the fact that it has contributions from more than 30 world class programmers 😀

Thank you Google 🙂