pratul dot in

Sweet results of evangelism

lut4rp — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:58:57 +0000

I got this e-mail a week ago...

Hi,

My name is Sandeep Soni.I had been to IIT kanpur this year during the
Techkriti Festival where I attended the FOSSkriti seminars.

I distinguishably remember the seminar (or rather an informal
informative session) on Google Summer of Code that you delivered.

Inspired by your own experience about GSoC and open source
development, I applied for GSoC this year and fortunately have cleared
the first hurdle of getting selected. I will be working on the project
titled "Development of GIMPLE FE" under GCC organization mentored by
Diego Novillo for the Summer.

I have to thank you for giving that invaluable talk.I sincerely tried
to follow all the advice that you gave in that talk and am happy to
have been inducted into Summer of Code.I also mentioned your name in
the field about the source from which I first came to know about GSoC.
Although Its been only a week now into the schedule and I have not
even started coding, I have already begun to sense why you have been
so passionate about GSoC and Open source Development.I hope that the
coming days be fruitful and successful for me as they must have been
for you.

Thanks.
--
Cheers
Sandy

Very frankly, I don't remember Sandeep from the crowd. But what this has made him achieve, makes me very very proud. Even though I did not get through GSoC 2010, I consider this as an equivalent success. Best of luck, Sandeep!

The Theory of "Oh Thank God"

lut4rp — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:41:21 +0000

A while ago, I found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/+bug/532633/comme.... That's right, the Ubuntu SABDFL has confirmed that the new OS X style window title bar button placement, is here to stay. In response, the following theory was proposed by nirbheek on #hackers-india (now on irc.oftc.net).

< nirbheek> Step 1: Make incredibly lame decision which is utterly stupid, without reason, and actually backwards
< nirbheek> Step 2: Refuse to listen to people when they tell you so
< nirbheek> Step 3: Retract parts of the lame decision so that what you actually wanted from the start is done, i.e. mac-style button-placement
< nirbheek> Step 4: Everyone goes "Oh thank god"

Canonical, we know what you're doing.

Flash with Drupal - a review

lut4rp — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:51:43 +0000

Adobe’s Flash has always had a love-hate relationship with the Internet community. On one end, it allowed web publishers to display beautiful, interactive (and sometimes garish) animated content on their websites. On the other end, it crashed browsers, leaked memory and irritated a lot of people. However, its popularity has still been not shaken by other alternatives, like Microsoft’s Silverlight.

I have personally seen and admired a lot of Drupal websites with Flash powered content. Notable ones have been Mission Metallica (http://www.missionmetallica.com/) and Leadel (http://www.leadel.net/). However, The power and flexibility of the Drupal and Flash combo shouldn’t intimidate you anymore. Travis Tidwell’s “Flash with Drupal” from Packt Publishing is an amazing step by step guide for your journey.

I’m not a very experienced Flash or ActionScript programmer myself. However, just the initial chapters of the book were enough to give me a confidence boost. This isn’t as hard as it seems after all! The book succinctly covers the use of various contributed modules over its 350+ pages. It goes through the trickeries of asynchronous programming and REST. It takes you through the most asked questions around Drupal: Views, CCK, audio and video widgets etc. That said, this is not an introduction to Drupal. In fact, if you’re just starting out with Drupal, this book is not for you. The author assumes you’re comfortable with Drupal and its concepts. You should know your way in and out of Drupal. Not ready? Get hold of Packt’s “Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6”.

Flash seems to be feeling the heat with HTML5, but until that happens and cross-browser support stabilizes, Flash isn’t going anywhere. Now with this book, I expect to see a rise in the Flash and Drupal combination and more powerfully delivered content.

(Note: I was sent a free copy of the book by Packt for a review.)

Almost Monokai for Xcode

lut4rp — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:25:56 +0000

Here's the Almost Monokai theme (based on the original Monokai) that I recently ported to Xcode. 5 minute job, but I like it already :-)

Attachment	Size
Almost Monokai.xccolortheme	3.45 KB

Looking for open source Mac programmers

lut4rp — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:56:48 +0000

I'm looking for fellow open source Mac programmers from India. Is there anybody out there?

Facebook Lite fails

lut4rp — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 06:51:03 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook introduced a "lighter, faster alternative" called Facebook Lite. Though initially, it was aimed at users from countries with slow internet connections and marginal broadband penetration (like India :-) they soon realized a lot of people liked the Lite way of working. I agree, Lite is fast and slick, but it doesn't have apps >:) That to me at least was a major switch point.

I was one of those "privileged souls" who had the good fortune to beta test Facebook Lite. So I can switch to Lite if I use the lite.facebook.com URL or use the full thingy if I go to facebook.com. But, ever since Facebook finally rolled out Lite to sections of users across India (dunno if they did so elsewhere as well), the users who accepted the "Try Facebook Lite" message can *NOT* go back.

People (including my sister and hordes from college :-p) have tried to manually change the URL to facebook.com, tried to check account settings, tried flaming the Lite fan page (see below), tried doing everything plainly possible without any avail. Tried logging in again but it just redirects to lite.facebook.com. Oh, and no official word from Facebook on this yet. Are you listening, Facebook?

The Omegle Experiment - 1

lut4rp — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:37:01 +0000

Stranger: where are the bodies
     You: they are right here.
     You: you may look at them
Stranger: what are you planning
     You: I think I should dispose them
     You: if found, i could be in trouble
Stranger: why did you kill them
     You: i had to! 
     You: I HAD TO!
     You: I was meant to kill them! That's my purpose!
Stranger: where are you
     You: Its a secret, I can't tell you
     You: the others know about this already?
Stranger: it's been in 4chan
Stranger: we're currently tracking you down
     You: oh no.
     You: this is not right!
Stranger: you can't run
Stranger: don't run
     You: i can't run
     You: you can't find me
Stranger: we will need to
Stranger: it's called justice

-- Your conversational partner has disconnected.

The Drupal Community

lut4rp — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:53:07 +0000

[18:59]         sid0 : lut4rp: well everyone knows that drupal sucks, so...
[18:59]          jai : yes
[18:59]          jai : but their community is awesome
[19:00]          jai : contributors are insanely motivated
[19:00]          jai : to the point of nausea

jai (GSoC 2009 student and FFmpeg developer) and sid0 (GSoC 2008 student, Mozilla developer and intern) during a random rant on Drupal caching and the bot module.

Innovative basket design

lut4rp — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:54:24 +0000

I'd really call this a hack :-)

ZNC roxor

lut4rp — Sat, 23 May 2009 17:31:40 +0000

I’ve been using ZNC for the past two weeks now, and its awesome. In fact, I like it far more that a screen + irssi combination, and the recently-getting-popular Quassel core + client combination. So what’s so nice about ZNC? Its an IRC bouncer.

The advantage, you ask? I can use any client to connect to my ZNC `instance`. Yes! So I can use Colloquy (if I’m on my dad’s MacBook) or irssi if I’m on my own notebook. Lets go slightly technical now... ZNC runs as a daemon on a remote machine (say, your VPS?) on a port you specify (say 8888). It has these super easy settings where you specify what IRC network(s) you want to connect to. Then you press the Big Red Button. Now, the next time you want to connect to IRC, you don’t connect to the IRC network, you connect to your.server.address:8888. Push in your server password and vala! Your client will automatically join the servers and channels you had set up! Talk about smartness, eh?

And no, the phun doesn’t stop there. There are tons of modules available (and Mr. h4x0r can write his own in C++ or Perl or Tcl) which allow even smarter stuff. You can setup multiple users (each with their own modules and configuration) within the same ZNC instance. Users can have encrypted buffers and logs. No need to SSH to the server to change configurations every time (gasp!), you can control everything via a /query! Its everything you need, and more. Get it from http://znc.in.