Barcamp chennai 3

For those who don’t know what a barcamp is “BarCamp is an unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.“

As usual i switched on my notebook to check tweets in the morning. People were tweeting about something called “Barcamp”. I decided to go and check it out. I added my name to the wiki and registered myself. Then i made a call to my biker pal @sup3kiddo to check whether he is coming so that i can get a lift .

We entered the SRM vadapalani campus by 11 in the morning. We were given with a participant kit. We wrote our name and twitter handle on a sticker and pasted on our t-shirts.

I spent some time with people i already know in FOSS circles. By 12.30 prakash of ethics technologies started his talk on Android mobile platform, he explained how openness of android helps developer community. I was surprised to learn that android is being ported to set-of boxes, refrigerators. Then we had a yummy free lunch , thanks to generous sponsors.

In the afternoon social media enthusiast Kiruba Shankar joined us, he made the crowd sit in circles. While shivasubramanian was preparing for his talk on ‘Free and open internet’, Vivek a young internet entrepreneur volunteered to give a lightening talk. He owns a start up which creates and maintains mock interview website http://interviewstreet.com/ . Being new to entrepreneurship he was trying to get some ideas about how to get things done in a start up from the audience. I must mention his business card was way too cool, it got one of my favorite xkcd comic on its back

Shivasubramanian was talking about how Governments and corporations trying to control/restrict internet in the name of protecting children. He is part internet society an independent international nonprofit organization founded in 1992.

Then senthilnayagam CTO of rails factory a Ruby on Rails application development and consulting company, started a discussion on today’s movies. He later revealed about a software named ‘screenplay editor’ which his company is developing to help create screen plays for movies . Punch lines like “You can fix a bug in production, but cannot do the same in movies” popped up from the audience . Definitely talk on movies brought lot of people into the discussion.

Himanshu Sheth shared his views on how to use the professional networking website linkedin effectively. He explained how he got jobs in tough times with the help of linkedin. Then he revealed how he met the love his life via his blog. That was a good story .

Ramasubramanian pulled lot of young audience with his talk on “Entrepreneurship and love” . It was one of the coolest presentations of the barcamp. He interestingly compared entrepreneurship and falling in love. kiruba made the crowd blast with his comment “You can sell a successful venture but you can’t do that with your girlfriend”.

When some one was talking about ‘what makes a good marketer?’ i went out to get some coffee with vasanth . When i was back, shyamala of netlink technologies started her talk on drupal a popular open source content management system which powers whitehouse.gov. She made nambitious a non tech guy to create a website in minutes.

Anand a third year computer science student from VIT, shared his ideas on “collaborative mindmap“. He showed us a four minute screencast of his webapp. We clapped when he said php sucks and replaced it with python-django in a mindmap .

Magesh was unable to demo his RoR stuff because of his laptop graphics problem . We came to an end by 5.30pm . Barcamp organizer yuvi panda (yuvraj pandian) got bumps on his back in the end . Pepsi was served instead of booze .

The whole event was live tweeted with the tag #bcc3 by the participants. You can track it using http://twitter.com/search?q=bcc3

Pushed my first package in Fedora repository

Yesterday, i pushed my first  package in Fedora repository. I have been working to package emacs-irsim-mode for couple of days. It was reviewed by chitlesh . Here is the  bugzilla review request . Irsim mode is one of the next release target for FEL (fedora electronics laboratory) . According to this ticket Irsim mode for emacs will add value the  digital/FPGA designer.

I have following packages needs to be reviewed in bugzilla

• emacs-goodies – Misc add-ons for emacs
• emacs-haskell-mode – Haskell mode for emacs
• emacs-spice-mode – Needs lot of fix, may be some one who knows elisp can help
• emacs-identica-mode – Identica  mode for emacs
• cricscore-applet – An applet that brings cricket score to your gnome panel , i haven’t added it to bugzilla for review yet, i am not sure about BuildRequires and Requires fields of Spec file.

Any one wish to start with packaging for Fedora can start with this excellent article by shakthi. Now back to work .

Moving to wordpress

I have moved my blog to wordpress. Please update your bookmarks to arunsag.wordpress.com . Thanks

My first talk on Gnu/Linux and free software

Today,I have conducted a tech talk on Gnu/Linux in my college ..People were very excited about the compiz-fusion effects i shown them..I just covered the very basic things..Even most of them asked questions back..One girl came forward and tried her hands with compiz effects

It was really a mixture of fun , free software philosophy and knowledge …Thanks to club innovative.

Upcoming Foss Events:

State level workshop on Linux -venue:Mepco schlenk Engineering College,sivakasi. date:Feb21,Feb22
(All are invited, for more details please contact jagadish1988[at]gmail[dot][com] )

National level Conference on FOSS: -Venue:TCE, madurai dates:Feb 27, Feb 28 and Mar 1

(For more details goto http://www.fossconf.in)

well i am not going to conduct those events (just a participant)..They are going to be conducted by professionals

See you all there

Those who missed my tech talk please feel free to download the presentation(pdf) (odp) and mail me for any clarifications..

Why i use GNU/Linux and Free software?

I thought it will be nice to list the reasons for me to use GNU/linux and Free software!

1. First It works!

2. I don’t have money to buy software [:P] (well free software doesn’t need to be free of cost but most of them do)

3. I love the ethics and philosophy involved in free software.

4. I don’t like cracking software.

5. I hate searching for cracks and keygens on that nasty website

6. I don’t want to be called as a pirate by morons

7. I don’t like installing antivirus (It doesn’t mean that GNU/linux dont have viruses)

8. I hate updating them [:P]

9. I hate installing device drivers in windows (As they come along with GNU/linux, i dont have to)

10. I hate installing additional generic software separately which i use in day to day business (GNU/linux has most of the generic software inbuilt with the default installation like pdf readers,browsers, media players,instant messenger,cd/dvd writing software,office productivity software,archiver )

11. I dont have to fear of viruses and pendrives anymore.I hate using buggy IE.

12. I hate using mouse (a culprit which will make you tired and sick), I have become a command freak [:P] (you can control each and every part of GNU/linux using commands)

13. GNU/Linux helps me saving battery power of my laptop.

(how? i made my GNU/linux notebook to start in runlevel 3, which never starts the GUI by default, i used to listen songs by creating mplayer playlist and start playing files in runlevel 3 [:D] that is command line. you know what i get 4.5 hours of battery life )

14. I have lot of interest in security.

15. I want to be in control of my computer and don’t want the computer to control me [:)]

16. I like sharing free copies of GNU/linux with others.which proprietary software forbids me to.

17. Finally i hate monopoly!

note:points 15 and 16 are added as lajpat’s recommendation

Google Marked Every site as Harmfull last evening!

Last evening google marked its every search result as harmful [:D] …

Edit: Google says sorry! [:P]

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for your understanding.

Here is another explanation :http://blog.stopbadware.org/2009/01/31/google-glitch-causes-confusion

Search your Stick!

I got an interesting mail from one of my dearest mentor ,senior and a great software professional..

I wanna share that mail with you all…..

Here we go………….

Hi All,

Hope i meet you all in pink health and best cheers. Every one of you should be tight and committed in your projects and wishes that you come out with a successful work.
Happened to see a lot of happenings in Mepco Site. If you have a chance for attending those, please do it, as it may help you on your career mending.

As you all know, the IT market is suffering from a serious recession, it becomes more important for a campus placed Graduate to equip himself, more than a job seeker.
Yes friends,. Some of your friends (seniors) who got a campus placement in esteemed org. are still waiting for their training call. they are neither inducted nor informed. I happened to meet one such junior and she shared a sense of helplessness.

Tough life ahead. Its more tougher than life in Mepco.
The recession seems to exist till 2010 and ofcourse, you a challenging days ahead.Concentrate more on learning concepts than languages, improve the level of adaptability and ofcourse high skill required in self marketing.

You might have heard that preference for S/W eng for marriage has been reduced due to their insecurity(Thank god, i got it done 2 yrs before).Not only Loans denied for professionals also jobs are denied.I am not trying to scare you all. I am neither a poochandi nor a Otraikannan. These are hard truths in the market.

Companies like, infy , wipro and TCS have started their lay offs. Managers are informed of pay cuts and no increments for the year of 2009-2010. hard to digest.

Sathyam played a key role in bringing down the credentials of Indian IT. There are going to be challenges across the It industry to recruit the out coming 40K employees.No ideas about the project they handled. Now its board says that its employees can be paid for the month of Jan.Pathetic condition.

Still, we start early in the morning, travel for more than 40 KM, sit in front of our mail boxes with lot of expectations on any new assignment or appraisal.Its hope that we can walk in this rope. But to walk we need a balancing stick, which gives us the confidence to move up. Being struck in this period, this becomes necessary for you too.

So friends… “Search for your Stick and practice your walk…”

Sorry if i have bored you. Just thought of sharing things with you all.

I have missed the mail ids of our other friends. If you find it worthfull, do pass it on as well.

Do excuse, if i have taken much of your time…..I started this mail as i was not having any assignemnts. Expecting atleast i would be assigned some task from you all, in teh from of replying….

Back to work (thinking of what to do…..)

–
Regards,
Suresh VeeraRaghavan

—————–

“Concentrate more on learning concepts than languages”

I love this line.Here we stand guys, i happen to see many people doing their project in .NET and JAVA ,well most of them outsource.

Please open your eyes guys and gals tough days ahead

How a pro-microsoft girl respond when you talk her about free software?

Last evening, i had talk with some girl who is running Micro$oft dot net club in a college, I tried to explain her why micro$oft isn’t good for the students community…

But she was good at making me angry by her words…

Let me write down some of her responses ..which came from her without knowing what to say for my questions….

ME: people in microsoft campus club don’t have irc channel huh?Then why don’t you create one in freenode.net ?

SHE:okay

What? Arrrgg

ME:In kerala they are using free software in all departments..now it seems to be there is a problem there..the IT advisor has been changed…ms is trying something bad there….

SHE:hohohoho

ME: why don’t you drop your ms campus club for the sake of students?Any way no one is going to come to your club :p?

SHE:wateva

i dont give a damn

go 2 hell

[she used "hohoho" many times ]

Then i said her about the current IT scenario about our country,”We people are always going to work for a service company, we always doing background work for big MNC’s then they are make out work as a product and selling back to us, why dont we create our own product ? free software encourages entrepreneurship “

She:so why you are waitin for go get it buddy…

Finally she said “i am not disagreeing with you people” “i like it too”

——————————

Lesson learnt: Never ever try to preach fanboys (fangirls i wonder does this word exist?)of M$

Making Udev to work for you

What is Udev?

Whenever you plug a device in your linux box,the node(device file) corresponding to the device is created in /dev directory.Udev is daemon which manages dynamic creation of these files.udev not only provides dynamic device management but also creation of user chosen device names,running a script or program when a device node is created.
The above functionality of udev is controlled by rules.The default rules are kept in /etc/udev/rules.d/ directory.The sweet part of udev is that we can write our own rules and make udev work for us .

Well how i made udev to work for me?

I have no broadband connection (fighting with my dad to get one ).I use my nokia 3110c mobile phone to connect Airtel GPRS/EDGE.To connect the internet i plug my mobile using a usb connector the usbmodem(well mobile acts as usbmodem) will be detected as /dev/ttyACM0.Then i open terminal use wvdial command to connect the internet,its really a boring task to open the terminal and issue wvdial command each time.

How to write a rule so that it automatically connects me to the internet when i plug-in my mobile:

To write a rule we should identify and match the device uniquely, in my case the device is my usb modem.
There are several matching keys available so that you can precisely finger point your device to udev and make udev to take appropriate action defined by you.

Here are some matching keys:
* KERNELS – match against the kernel name for the device, or the kernel name for any of the parent devices
* SUBSYSTEMS – match against the subsystem of the device, or the subsystem of any of the parent devices
* DRIVERS – match against the name of the driver backing the device, or the name of the driver backing any of the parent devices
* ATTRS – match a sysfs attribute of the device, or a sysfs attribute of any of the parent devices

For example to pinpoint my hard drive to udev the rule will be like this:

KERNEL==”sda”,SUBSYSTEM==”block”,ATTR{size}==”312581808″,NAME=”my_hard_drive”

The above rule specifies udev if the kernel name for the disk is ‘sda’, if its a block device and the size of it is 312581808 then name it as my_hard_drive..so you can see /dev/my_hard_drive device file created when the rule is parsed by udev.

Well one might wonder how did i get these information? Here comes udevinfo in handy.

[root@localhost ~]# udevinfo -a -p /sys/block/sda/

The above command will give you the detailed information about the device(hard drive in this case) which is something like this.

looking at device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda’:
KERNEL==”sda”
SUBSYSTEM==”block”
DRIVER==”"
ATTR{range}==”16″
ATTR{removable}==”0″
ATTR{size}==”312581808″
ATTR{capability}==”12″
ATTR{stat}==” 60259 55701 1692944 1457888 342794 1393752 13915984 186839073 0 1982886 188349105″

looking at parent device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block’:
KERNELS==”block”
SUBSYSTEMS==”"
DRIVERS==”"

looking at parent device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0′:
KERNELS==”0:0:0:0″
SUBSYSTEMS==”scsi”
DRIVERS==”sd”
ATTRS{device_blocked}==”0″
ATTRS{type}==”0″
ATTRS{scsi_level}==”6″
ATTRS{vendor}==”ATA “
ATTRS{model}==”ST9160823ASG “
ATTRS{rev}==”3.AD”
ATTRS{state}==”running”
ATTRS{timeout}==”60″
ATTRS{iocounterbits}==”32″
The output is truncated….

when writing rules you cannot combine and mix-up attribute of diffrent parent devices.

The above method might be easy if you can find where your device is in sysfs file system (i.e /sys ).But its really difficult(atleast for the firsttimer ) to find out exactly the desired device in /sys folder.To get around this problem just plug-in your device and use the below command.

udevinfo -a -p $(udevinfo -q path -n /dev/)

To list the attributes details about usb modem(mobile) use the below command:

udevinfo -a -p $(udevinfo -q path -n /dev/ttyACM0)

well ttyACM0 is the usb modem i just inserted.The output will be something like….

looking at device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.1/tty/ttyACM0′:
KERNEL==”ttyACM0″
SUBSYSTEM==”tty”
DRIVER==”"

looking at parent device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.1/tty’:
KERNELS==”tty”
SUBSYSTEMS==”"
DRIVERS==”"

looking at parent device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.1′:
KERNELS==”6-2:1.1″
SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”
DRIVERS==”cdc_acm”
ATTRS{bInterfaceNumber}==”01″
ATTRS{bAlternateSetting}==” 0″
ATTRS{bNumEndpoints}==”01″
ATTRS{bInterfaceClass}==”02″
ATTRS{bInterfaceSubClass}==”02″
ATTRS{bInterfaceProtocol}==”01″
ATTRS{modalias}==”usb:v0421p005Ed0491dc02dsc00dp00ic02isc02ip01″
ATTRS{bmCapabilities}==”6″

looking at parent device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb6/6-2′:
KERNELS==”6-2″
SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”
DRIVERS==”usb”
ATTRS{configuration}==”"
ATTRS{bNumInterfaces}==”15″
ATTRS{bConfigurationValue}==”1″
ATTRS{bmAttributes}==”e0″
ATTRS{bMaxPower}==”100mA”
ATTRS{urbnum}==”13625″
ATTRS{idVendor}==”0421″
ATTRS{idProduct}==”005e”
ATTRS{bcdDevice}==”0491″
ATTRS{bDeviceClass}==”02″
ATTRS{bDeviceSubClass}==”00″
ATTRS{bDeviceProtocol}==”00″
ATTRS{bNumConfigurations}==”1″
ATTRS{bMaxPacketSize0}==”64″
ATTRS{speed}==”12″
ATTRS{busnum}==”6″
ATTRS{devnum}==”5″
ATTRS{version}==” 2.00″
ATTRS{maxchild}==”0″
ATTRS{quirks}==”0×0″
ATTRS{authorized}==”1″
ATTRS{manufacturer}==”Nokia”
ATTRS{product}==”Nokia 3110c”

[The output is truncated...]
And here is the rule:

KERNEL==”ttyACM0″,SUBSYSTEM==”tty”,ATTRS{manufacturer}==”Nokia”,ATTRS{product}==”Nokia 3110c”,RUN+=”/usr/bin/wvdial”

RUN+=”/usr/bin/wvdial” calls the wvdial to dial the internet (my case airtel ) when the modem is detected by udev in /dev/ttyACM0 according to the rule written it will automatically call wvdial to connect

Create a new file something called 10-local.rules inside /etc/udev/rules.d/ directory, write your own rules and save it.Remember don’t mess with the existing rule files!

Custom rules can be written to handle any device like digital camera,pendrive,external harddrive,etc that you plug-in into your linux box…

So lets start writing rules…… i guess does windows have such feature? or do they allow users to do these type of things without a third-party software?

References and Further reading:

http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html -Good documentation on writing udev rules

http://kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev_vs_devfs –Udev vs devfs

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/device-list/devices.txt — list of devices and their corresponding device names in /dev folder helps you to find your device file names

Having Fun in IRC

Well it was fun monday……Just logged into irc-channel created by Mr.lawgon (he has some other name)
Have a Look @ the conversations………
zer0c00l its me….

–> You are now talking on #nrc-foss-edu
— Topic for #nrc-foss-edu is Welcome to #nrc-foss-edu a channel to discuss FOSS in higher education in India || Channel rules: http://nrcfosshelpline.in/code/wiki/NrcFossEdu || http://nrcfosshelpline.in/code/ || mailing list: nrcfossconsult@googlegroups.com || FOSS certification: http://nrcfosshelpline.in/syllabus/FossWebDeploymentEngineer
Topic for #nrc-foss-edu set by lawgon at Tue Dec 2 17:34:19 2008
#nrc-foss-edu :[freenode-info] please register your nickname…don’t forget to auto-identify! http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#nicksetup
zer0c00l-> so when will anna university give more importance to foss?
>nickserv< register ******(ma passwd) sagarun[at]gmail.com
lawgon-> who knows?
zer0c00l-> well i guess you know
why dont you people push
a student in government school uses open office in his lab..but when he comes to anna university affiliated engineering college he is forced use Microsoft office in his first semester
why is this gap?
may be its not your question lawgon
some moron from 218.75.53.68
sshd my computer

how can i kick him
well its some Chinese moron
http://218.75.53.68/sp/wp_webuser.sp he is running http as well
let me send an abuse email
–> HDB (i=3b5dac22@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-41d70ce0f3234a0e) has joined #nrc-foss-edu
HDB-> yoohoo
lawgon: see my reply on why a license is needed?
HDB-> zer0c00l: hello
zer0c00l-> hello HDB
HDB-> zer0c00l: who you sending abuse email to?
zer0c00l-> somebody from 218.75.53.68 made ssh connections to my computer
this morning
its seems like a Chinese government website
http://218.75.53.68/sp/wp_webuser.sp
HDB-> wow. chinese govt is doing hacking??
zer0c00l-> may be somebody hacked the Chinese government servers
and using that server to hide himself
government servers are soft targets
well i want to inform them
that their server is compromised
how can i do that
any idea?
HDB-> zer0c00l: buy a ticket to beijing
zer0c00l-> http://www.cooleasy.com/whois.php?ip=218.75.53.68
thats a good idea
well buy me a ticket
HDB-> ask Lap_64 uncle
zer0c00l-> oh
Lap_64 uncle are you there?
knock knock uncle
let me ask in binrev
http://www.binrev.com/forums
i wonder how he got my ip address
HDB-> zer0c00l: maybe random try. what’s your ip??
zer0c00l-> i dont want to tell that
hehehe
why you need thaty
?
ask the operator
probably he knows it
HDB-> oprater??
no he doesnt
zer0c00l-> oh
HDB-> freenode knows it
zer0c00l-> yeah
HDB-> oops, you are not protected. your ip is visible on doing /whois zer0c00l
zer0c00l-> too bad
then i have to use a strong password
and disable unnecessary vulnerable service
omg i am running hell lot of services
HDB-> you are on windows xp
?
zer0c00l-> no
i hate windows shit
HDB-> Lap_64 uncle is windows fan
zer0c00l-> hahaha
o
HDB-> never upgraded from Windows 98
zer0c00l-> i have bad opinion about people using windows
HDB-> no, Lap_64 is fine
zer0c00l-> your ip is 59.93.*.* (edited )

HDB-> yeah I don’t hide it. what’s the point
zer0c00l-> why cant i port scan your computer?
* HDB is small fish
zer0c00l-> using windows vista or something?
iptables up and running?
HDB-> zer0c00l: don’t do that stuff. it is illegal. and if you are in India, you can be arrested
HDB-> laws are very tough
zer0c00l-> oh really
HDB-> yep
where are you? chennai?
zer0c00l-> btw i am using neighbors wifi
hehehe
yep
HDB-> then he will get arrested. what city?
zer0c00l-> omg
thats bad
HDB-> what?
zer0c00l-> arrested
:O
HDB-> IT Act 2000 (Amendment 2006)
zer0c00l-> oh
HDB-> btw, amendment 2006 was really passed in 2008
zer0c00l-> i read about that
its baad
HDB-> took them 2 yrs
brb…
<– HDB has quit ("http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client")
zer0c00l-> zer0c00l wonders: HDB a police officer or lawyer
does any one knows how to prevent ssh logins from the internet
how can i make sshd to ignore logins from the internet
well google search will help me i guess

————

But really i wasn’t using my neighbours ip address at that time. [:P]