GSOC

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, 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 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Life

IRC is addictive, I am hooked

I have been spending time on IRC since a few months ( 8-9 months) now. For those who don’t know what IRC is, check wiki. This is also a kinda social network but a bit different. This is more or less like yahoo chat rooms. Freenode is one of the most famous networks on IRC. Here I am talking about the techie part of it. Almost every open source project has a development and support channel on Freenode.

I came across IRC in my first summer vacations. Back then, I used to hang out in #fedora (anything prefixed with a # denotes a channel … like a chat room) as a newbie to see what people talk about. And used to ask any questions that came my way. BTW, I use Xchat as an IRC client. I started answering to people’s questions as I gathered experience and expertise. The regular journey with IRC started in 6th sem. I came in contact with a lot of people via IRC. I came across Seth Vidal on #yum. And we discussed a lot about local yum mirror management. IntelligentMirror is an outcome of the discussions that went on for almost two months in #yum.

My activity slowed down on IRC after I got busy with projects. After the GSOC result announcement, Ajay Kumar, a GSOC participant from India, created a channel (##gsoc-india) for selected Indians for GSOC’08. I am a regular in that channel now. There are a lot of people from all over the country, from different streams (CS, ECE, Civil etc..), from different institutes (IITs, DCE, DU, NITs, IIIT, PEC etc..) and from different places 🙂 I have got a lot of new friends. We have a lot of fun doing bc, sometimes discussing issues of national interest 😛 and sometimes projects if time allows 😛 Its really addictive and I tend to respond to every single message.

BTW, it may interest you to know that India is #2 in accepted students for GSOC after US. And next time we’ll probably beat them.

PS1 : Fedora 9 is out. Bandwidth sucking big time even in vacations 🙁 It’ll take almost 15 hours for Fedora 9 to be in. I am eager to check it out.

PS2 : Getting a lot of ideas to post about.

PS3 : We are hoping have a meetup for GSOC participants at Google Delhi and Bangalore Office. It would be REAL fun if it happens 🙂

PS4 : This is probably the best blog post I have ever seen.

 
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 😀