A Few of Today's Webcomics...

...made me laugh unusually hard =)


UserFriendly


xkcd: Convincing Pickup Line


Wondermark




PS:

if (understood ${UserFriendly_joke} || understood ${xkcd_tooltip}) \
&& is_girl; then
    sendmail ${blog_author}
fi


rohitj and #fosskriti

So it all started sometime ago when rohitj said that someone should kick him from #fosskriti because the channel was distracting him too much

<rohitj> kick me from this channel. else I am seeing it again and again
<hippieindamakin8> :)))
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to devilsadvocate
* devilsadvocate has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (User terminated!)
* devilsadvocate removes channel operator status from devilsadvocate
* devilsadvocate grins

So, it was all started by devilsadvocate, and now rohitj can't spend too long on the channel without getting repeatedly kicked :D

* rohitj (n=rohitj@203.200.95.130) has joined #fosskriti
<hippieindamakin8> hey rohitj welcome back
<rohitj> thank you thank you
>ChanServ< op #fosskriti
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to bheekling
* bheekling has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (bye bye! :P)
* bheekling removes channel operator status from bheekling
<bheekling> This is fun :>
* rohitj (n=rohitj@203.200.95.130) has joined #fosskriti
<rohitj> thank you bheekling
<rohitj> now stop it
>ChanServ< op #fosskriti
<rohitj> :P
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to bheekling
* bheekling has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (again! wheee)
* bheekling removes channel operator status from bheekling

This is phun >:->

portage-talk, gsoc, gentoo, ntgwn, and more

A lot has been happening in the past two weeks, but I'll (try to) keep the post relatively short.

• portage-talk - A "library" of bash functions that can be used to talk to Portage (the tree + package db). It's basically for use in bash scripts to get data about installed packages, ebuilds, etc. It aims to be blazing fast and have minimal dependencies (nothing beyond bash + coreutils). This also means that the code isn't very pretty ;)
  
  I've been hacking on it on and off over the past week, and hope to have it good enough shape to shamelessly boast about it to more people :)
  



• GSoC - So, tomorrow is the deadline for submitting apps (which is likely to be extended following tradition ;). I submitted my abstract and proposal yesterday, and I'm currently keeping my fingers tightly crossed (along with the occasional running around in circles screaming and giggling at the same time).
  
  Steev and Patrick & Patrick and Steev have expressed interest in co-mentoring me (Gentoo projects have two mentors); let's see how everything turns out :)



• Satya also applied for GSoC this time. Her proposed project is the deceptively simple-looking idea to rewrite/extend Bootchart using Systemtap. Her mentor-if-she-gets-selected is Eugene Teo, who (going by what she's been telling me) has been an excellent (pre-project-acceptance) mentor; who is extremely patient, understanding, and an overall gem of a guy.



• GNOME 2.22.0 is (mostly) in-tree - The Gentoo GNOME Herd has almost completed moving GNOME 2.22 from the overlay to the tree. They have done a wonderful job by fixing a ton of bugs in just this month. As soon as all the bugs blocking the GNOME 2.22 tracker are resolved, and a few more reds converted to green on the gnome-2.22 status page, GNOME 2.22 will be unmasked, and users will be able to revel in the joy that is 2.22 :)



• Not The GWN - New issue released by Patrick!



• xulrunner-1.9 and mozilla-firefox-3 will be added to portage (p.masked) by armin76 when the beta5 is released :-)



• rohitj wrote an XChat plugin for dpaste (and has been bugging the rest of us to try it out for the past two days ;)



• More stuff that I can't remember :-/


Update: Another NTGWN issue released by Patrick :D

Raghu Dixit's Tribe...

... a very apt name for the social network of a band with aptitude (some folks might see the horrible Debian pun here ;P).
So, today (or yesterday?), the Tribe was opened to public.

And it looks darn good for a website created by one man. I would have refused to believe it was coded in just a few weeks while juggling 5 different things at once, but the dirty secret made the story believable ;)

So, all of you guys who have listened to Raghu Dixit, go and join right now.

And, all of you guys who haven't listened to Raghu Dixit, go and listen now.

The beauty of Pearl Jam

Riot Act - sends a shiver through my entire body whenever I listen to the album.

Midsems - II got over today. The exam I did best in was CE452. This really doesn't tell you much about my performance if you think about it. Marks will come soon, but I'll be home for a week by then. A very short week with 4 days spent travelling.
But I'm not complaining. I've long since learnt that vacations, no matter how long, are always too short. Now I just take whatever I get and don't complain.

Midsems usually have a very peculiar effect on people in the campus. The Newsgroup's activity peaks with posts longer than some people's notes being posted every couple of minutes. The most interesting threads are always during the midsems.

People start to behave oddly and message people things such as below:

someone: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
someone: I AM AN IDIOT
someone: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
someone:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
someone: HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA

And other people somehow find themselves mirroring the same feelings..

I don't know why I suddenly find Pearl Jam so blissful again. For 2 whole months, I didn't listen to Pearl Jam because it used to make me too depressed. Now I can't get enough of it. Radiohead still depresses me though, so I'm not listening to that. It's been 4 months I think.

In any case, I guess I should go out and roam around aimlessly for a while. The weather is too beautiful.

If only I could take Pearl Jam + Altec Lansing Bass with me outside as well...

-------x-------

PS: GNOME 2.22 releases today.

Updated:



:-)

I love you guys

Creationists can't fail Earth Science: Oklahoma

That's the spirit lads! I'd love to see more bills like this passed in the US, it's excellent news for the rest of us. Who wouldn't want to see the Big Bully shoot itself repeatedly in the foot without even noticing it? Anyone not in the US who currently feels dismayed by news items such as these should instead whoop for joy! Remember, anything bad that happens to the US is good news for everyone else :-)

/me hosts a party in honour of this

wth?

Gosh, it's been a month since I last blogged, and that too while this has been a very blogpost-philic month. FOSSKriti started and got over, freed.in was attended and praised for high-quality talks while the Indian FOSS community was boo-ed for low attendance at the same. FOSDEM came and went, and left several hundred hangovers in Europe.

I became aware of LinuxChix's Indian Chapter, was delighted to know about it, and decided to become a part of the community, and spread the word :)
I also became painfully aware of how much damage a vocal minority can do to a community that's starting up. I constantly winced during the flamewars on the Gentoo mailing lists during it's "Great Fall", as some have come to call it (though I disagree with them). Seeing the same munitions being deployed on the LC-IN ML gives me a depressing premonition of disaster.

The GDM 2.22 rewrite wasn't finished in time for inclusion in GNOME 2.22 (Hard Code Freeze), but gvfs managed to port more stuff and also get a "working" ftp backend, removing another bug from the 2.22 blocker bugs list.

The Xorg people were shouted at for not taking care of hald/dbus restarts, and patches were committed to fix the issue.

Gentoo Trustees were elected, and the results were expected and hilarious at the same time :-)
GSoC '08 was announced, and applications were invited from the various Open Source projects.
Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò framed his (and coincidentally my) thoughts about devs participating in GSoC (better than I could have) in a mail to the ML.

Beagle is still pondering about GSoC -- let's see how that turns out :)

*bheekling realises that the above paras are probably missing stuff, are somewhat anachronistic, terse, overflowing with links, and lacking continuity, but he believes that a jumbled-up link-eyebleed post is better than a forever procrastinated one :P