Stuart Little!- Just for the laugh

Published
by
Ajay Kumar
on August 18, 2008
in GSoC 2008 and Thoughts
. 0 Comments

Stuart: What do you think, I am a man.. errr or a Mouse ???

Cat: [Looking at the mouse/stuart] *ahem* Is that a trick question ?

– rOFL!!!! :)  :)

[PS: Thats some post-Midnight laugh for me, /me goes to sleep! after documenting and coding all day & night!! :) ]
Its “Official Pencils Down date” for GSoC 2008 Coding. But I have a genuine question & concern. What if I didn’t use a Pencil at all ? Mostly I used a text editor to write my code. w00t! :-/ I get exempted from the clause right!! yAy! :P

Ok I see someone coming with a stick!… LH is that you ? :P

When /me was airborne!

Published
by
Ajay Kumar
on August 12, 2008
in Everything Else, Life and Thoughts
. 0 Comments

I recently had a flight, which as the title suggests, was my first one. It was worth noting as I felt things, which sent me back to the child hood dreams :P

I have visited airports earlier, went inside the aircraft, the pilots cabin. But never flew till date. So here was I, finally flying :P How was I feeling.. excited!!

The cabin crew was friendly, as they are supposed to be, but funny at the same time! They were doing weird things, which in the end, they also were laughing. Apparently because, they were enacting and someone else, the flight manager, was doing the voice over :P

Anyways this is not all important! :-)

The Beautiful part:

The plane starts moving on the runway… After like 10 minutes of doing catwalk, coming on the right take off path, it blasted off like I drive my car @ 100 mph, yeah right, of course at a greater speed. But I couldn’t relate to how fast it was running :) I was seeing the wings, which had a weird thing written on it “Please do not move over this line”. So I thought if we were allowed to walk till that line on the wings :P

I would have loved doing that while in-flight :D

I could get the idea of the speed, after the buildings appeared ant-sized within few seconds…! And the G Force was ON ME completely!! :-/

Child's Dream - Angels, Stars

Angels, Stars, Moon!

When things stabilized, I realized I was in between the clouds, and soon on top of them. I could see the bed of clouds beneath and it appeared as if I was walking on it! And it was slow motion!

Awww it was so great!! I was just awestruck by the experience and all I kept saying was “Wow!!”, luckily I had no co-passenger by my side :D

For a moment, I went back to the dream world, and I thought the place is so calm, quiet, peaceful… And wished, I stayed at such place all the time and slightly tears rolled out.. Dunno why?? But I wish I should have been here before :)

I could have jumped off and stayed there. But yeah I know.. So forget it :)

I loved the turns and the curves plane took. And was enjoying all the G-Force was doing to me!! The take off and in flight was beautiful, the landing on the other hand was OMG totally contrary and messy!!!

The Messy part:

I knew it wouldn’t be all goody goody for me, considering that I have motion sickness.

But considering I was alright till now, I thought “eh.. I am a man now! nothing happened to me!! yAy!” and then I ordered a Big veg burger, damn was I hungry! and a Mango drink [Yellow in color, this is important!!]

I gulped it all casually and then it was time for landing. Unfortunately I had one stoppage. So that means the plane takes off and lands 2 times!

As the plane descended, it was totally messy for me, I couldn’t understand what went wrong suddenly. Ears paining, plugged in the cotton buds, no use! Stomach brumbling.. wth! And then, nauseating feeling.. I grabbed the “paper” bag they had provided, probably for the same purpose, and held it. I didn’t like the paper smell and it just made things worse. I was trying to control it, but suddenly burst out like anything…

I threw all of it in that bag. Filled it up. I waved my hand to the cabin crew to ask for help, i.e. more paper bags. The girl said, “Sir we are already landing wait!”. Since no one is supposed to move around while take off or land. I was stuck for like 15 minutes while the plane descended and eventually landed and standing.

Now what happened meanwhile is what is funny and messy at the same time!!. I was holding the paper bag, little did I know it was getting all swollen from the bottom because of obvious reasons. And then, ******* !!!

All of it on my pants, the seat!! And what could I do!! Nothing! Why? “Sir the plane is already landing”

And I sat there, waiting for the immensely awesome and fresh fluid all over me, and slowly getting inside and everywhere!! I didn’t even have tissues at that point!

Mickey & Minnie Mouse ;)

Mickey & Minnie Mouse ;)

So what now…. The plane stops. I have an hour wait in the plane itself. The girl comes over, “Oh.. Don’t worry we will clean it up” I thought “WTH i am not a kid!! You guys could have saved this from happening”. So while the passengers got off, I was sitting embarrassed by the colorful fluid all over my pants…”

And I didn’t have any spare pants in my cabin luggage. So w00t now?

The cabin crew came with vacuum cleaners, cleaning the seat. Hard luck, they had to remove the seats :P I ask the man to vacuum clean my pants :D and dry it. *sigh* of relief no girls, except the cabin crew noticed all that!!

All settled, ready for take off 2. Settled down fine.. I thought I threw up everything already, and I didn’t have much left within. But what the heck, another landing and this time I was prepared!!!

I had 4-5 bags with me! yAy!! No mess this time ;) but of course I threw up!!

And then I was totally worn out, exhausted and what not!!!

All in all, I loved the beautiful part of the journey and this embarrassing part also makes me LOL!

And guys who gave all those tips to me! Thank you! But those didn’t help! You know why? Because you gave them post-incident & not pre-incident!

PS: This is a personal blog. And I am posting this experience of mine not for you all to laugh at me. But when I come over and see this.. I could laugh at myself :P

mukt.in v2 report :-) - An experience “delightful”!

Published
by
Ajay Kumar
on August 10, 2008
in Events and FOSS
. 0 Comments

This year, I made it to the event, after I came to know about it while hanging around on IRC in the Official Google Summer of Code channel. Interacting with the people in there, I got a chance to get involved and volunteer for tasks related to the event.

Considering most of the time I was occupied with work for GSoC, I managed to confirm my talk and attend the event for the whole of 3 days.

Event: mukt.in v2 2008

Venue: CSE Department, Osmania University, Hyderabad.

Date: 1-3 August 2008.

Day 1: I was excited that Bhavin Thurakia, CEO of the DirectI Group, was going to be the first “talk”er, considering the fact that I *am* a DirectI customer since few years now, I was looking forward to his talk.

Bhavin talked on “Building Scalable Architecture for Web Apps“ which I personally found very useful. It would have been better, if the mukt.in team had the speakers well informed about the type of audience. As mostly consisted of students, most of them couldn’t get much out of his talk.

I had my talk on the same day, and this being my first public talk. So running a “top” command would have resulted in “99% usage” thinking about “Whats gonna happen?” in my brain, while others were “talking”.

Lunch was awesome in terms of interaction we had. All speakers, while munching the Chinese food, got a chance to informally get to know each other and talk about stuff, mainly whats there talk is all about etc.

The other talk, prior to mine, was by Dushyanth Harinath, DirectI Group,  on “DNS Servers - Benchmarks & Performance Analysis” which again was useful. I had to keep special track of Dushyanth as my talk was after his, and during lunch whenever someone asked me about “When is your talk?” I responded “After the DNS Guy’s. OMG Where is he ?” and there he was smiling :-P. And NO. I didn’t miss my talk, neither did he :-) It was just coz the event was running an hour late coz the lunch arrived late!

After my talk, we had a BoF session with all the students, where they shot questions on to us related to:

  • How to get started with Linux
  • How to get contributing to a project
  • What is FOSS all about?
  • to questions like, Linux is OK, I know C, but where and how do I get started???? Was one student!

I am sure with the responses the students might have felt at ease and we also invited them, to bring on their PCs or Laptops to get a “hands on” demo from the speakers on things like How to install Linux or program etc. Not to mention, we already had Linux installation session that day by other speakers.

Day 2: I attended Vid’s talk on “Women in Libre Software Communities“, Openmoko talks by Shakthi Kannan from Qvantel, and a session on “Building Extensions in Ruby” by Thyagarajan. I missed the talk, maybe because I am Joomla! fan ;-),  “Intro to Drupal” by Warren Nohara, but I did manage to interact with him and we talked on my project and his work later on in the evening.

The FreeRunner fascinated me, but I still complained! If it had a different shape ;-) and a camera.. I would have bought as an end-user!! But the idea of it being Open, really opens up avenues for developers working in the Mobile area.

Day 3: I attended the talk by Sebastiaan Deckers, from DirectI Group. His talk was on “How to lead an Open Source Project” where he shared his experience being an admin for the project he founded. Pandion IM Windows Client for XMPP. It was fun as well as enlightening listening to his talk. Antano Solar John’s talk on “Learning to develop in the open source world” gathered interest too considering he suggested ways on how one should go about learning.

Day 3 ended with all speakers “rewinding” their talks for the sake of us, who missed each others talk. And we did some bunch of adventure too after that.. Car jacking ;-) That goes into another post tho!

The mukt.in volunteers do deserve praise for making the event possible and especially the students of the CSE, Osmania University! Thank you :-)

I am sure lessons were learned, everyone had fun, and the spirit of FOSS was shared…

Thanks to all the sponsors, volunteers, speakers who contributed to the events success!

[PS: I Know something's wrong with the topic] ;-)

Sahana at mukt.in 2008

Published
by
Ajay Kumar
on August 4, 2008
in FOSS, Featured Open Source Apps, GSoC 2008, Technology and sahana
. 3 Comments

Being introduced to Sahana was something that happened to me over an year back while working for my academic project, where I checked out Sahana and got to know about it.

With Google Summer of Code 2008 I got a chance to *actually* work and contribute ..

And while talking and working with guys at mukt.in, an idea popped up suddenly when krish said, “Hey AJuOnLiNE, why don’t you give a talk on Sahana“. I thought it was a great idea, but the event being in a different city and the dates of the event being quite some time ahead,  I wasn’t really sure if I would be able to make it.

But then I had the Google Bangalore office meet up and I managed to extend my stay for mukt.in :-) and not to mention the “You should go for it!!” I got from the Sahana main-dev list :-) and my Sahana mentor, Fran!

So here I was giving a talk on Sahana to the students of Computer Science Department at Osmania University, Hyderabad and speakers from the FOSS Community, IT Professionals, people highly experienced than me and in short it was fun pHun!

mukt.in is a FOSS promotion event which attracts audiences who are Newbies, Students, Professional, FOSS Advocates [not lawyers ;-)] , and speakers from other FOSS Projects/communities… This year the venue was Computer Science Department, Osmania University, Hyderabad. It was a 3 Day event, 1-3 August, 2008.

My main agenda at the event was to showcase:

  • what Sahana is
  • how kOoL it is
  • how it *has* been used in post-disaster situations
  • how can people/community contribute to it..

The best thing about contributing to Sahana, is you don’t really have to be a programmer in order to contribute. If you are an expert in any of the Domain/areas which concerns with the technology used, the humanitarian domain, an NGO, an independent citizen journalist, a Usability expert… you could just hop in to our mailing lists, share your knowledge, make suggestions, post feedback about the application or just share your own experience.

My event was on the very first day, we had the keynote done by Bhavin Thurakia, CEO of the DirectI Group on “Building Scalable Architecture for Web Apps“, which I found really useful, and other talks. My talk was post-lunch, and this was the *first* public talk that I presented.

I addressed audience queries from Students who found the project exciting and were willing to contribute, told them how they could go about working on the project, how Sahana can be used in India, scope for Translation, what kind of technologies it uses and how the students can learn from the code base and get started using the resources available.

I had a bunch of professionals curious to know about Sahana, some of them had never heard of something like this, and were really fascinated by the idea. So talking for Sahana and as a Sahana Developer I felt great and excited to “talk” :-)

It would be really great to see some of them, students, coming forward and getting into action with the Sahana code and more people coming to know about Sahana and spreading awareness…

I have the presentation available here & here.. Please feel free to post comments, and people who attended my talk are more than welcome to post their reviews!! I would love to hear from you guys!

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