Night in office
Its 4:09 AM and I am in office. Writing this post using GScribble. People in the room include Abhas Abhinav, Gaurav Khambala, Vignesh Prabhu, Amit Gulati. We are discussing about Google Chrome OS while I hack the deepofix installer. Loving it 
gscribble post
This is a test post created using gscribble http://sourceforge.net/projects/gscribble.
The author Roshan Singh is a fellow college mate and heads all technology related issues in at NIT Durgapur.
I have a feeling I will blog a LOT more now
Sunday
The day began with seeing off Shreyank (http://allsortsofshrink.blogspot.com/) at the Majestic Bus Stop (Bangalore). Vignesh and I then proceeded to Sandeep’s (http://ssandeep.wordpress.com/) place and had lunch. On Vignesh’s (http://2cents-by-viggy.blogspot.com/) insistence we then went to Jaydeep’s place at J.P. Nagar . Jaydeep had a life threatening motorbike accident a month back at NIT Durgapur. He had a brain surgery and was unconscious for almost a month. We spent around 2-3 hours with him. He has lost some memories and some part of his skull, but he is recovering very well.
We then went back to Majestic bus stop and explored the Market there. The shop keepers were quite rude. I asked a shopkeeper the price of a mp3 player and he said 600 Rs. Then I asked him the price of a mobile and he said “Ye dukaan daam poochhne ke liye nahi hai, item khareedne ke liye hai” (This shop is not meant for asking the cost, but for buying items). I was disgusted, and I told him that he lost good business. That shut him up.
We went around some more. Vignesh boarded a bus to his aunt’s place and I boarded the bus to R.T. Nagar. I noticed a young guy sitting at the opposite row of seats in the bus. He had a Diesel bag with a Fedora badge on it. I immediately felt the urge to talk to him. However, he was looking out the window and had earplugs on. Somehow, I could never bring myself to interrupt his activity.
Then I came to this cybercafe. Lets see what I do with the rest of the day. I do have a few things to buy. A door mat, and a duster cloth.
A great initiative
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A senior of mine from the 2k7 batch at NIT Durgapur, West Bengal has recently undertaken a great initiative. He has started a “Home Library” in Assam. “Manjit bhaiyya is 2007 batch passout of CSE department of our college and has worked in Microsoft for two years. Now he has setup a home library in his hometown in Assam with a vision of opening these Home Libraries in whole Assam to make India a more litrate country. With a motive of giving back to the society, he has started pursing this Dream and I am sure as with his strategy and execution he will reach to the stars and make it happen. Best of Manjit We are with you”
Bangalore
I came to Bangalore on 2nd June to join DeepRoot Linux (http://http://deeproot.in). My train tickets were not confirmed hence I had to burn a lot of money and book a flight from Kolkata to Bangalore. Jet Airways was far better than Indigo. They served breakfast.
I came from Bangalore Airport to Nandidurga in one of the kick-ass BIAL Volvos. Went to the office, met Vignesh, and started work.
My work involves developing the next version of deepofix mail server. That means replacing the MTA with something cutting-edge, improving the installer etc. There is also some work to be done on the LDAP front. The code is mostly in Perl. Take a look at http://code.deeproot.in.
One great thing is that Vignesh, my close friend from college and fellow GNU/Linux enthusiast has also joined along wit me. So we have a galla time.
The weather in Bangalore is very nice. There is always a nice breeze blowing and it rains intermittently, but not too much. In the mornings it gets quite chilly and taking a bath becomes a difficult proposition.
The business community in Bangalore (shopkeepers, auto drivers, bus conductors) is a turn off. They try their best to rip you off. Learning to fend off their cunning ways.
Thanks to Nishant and Mithilesh (from our MBA dept at NIT durgapur) I did not have to face too many problems in finding a PG. I found a newly constructed PG in R.T. Nagar.
R.T. Nagar is a nice place. You can find the Pizza huts and Cafe Coffee Days and also the Andhra Mess and the Tea stall. Life in all sizes.
It takes 15 minutes to go to office from RT Nagar bus stand.
Yesterday was a special day in office. We had a NIT Durgapur alumii meeting. A couple of seniors from 2k7 batch dropped in and we had a nice chat on how to improve the relationship with our alma-mater. A few hours later I was introduced by Abhas to Arki, of FSF Kerela. It was a pleasure to talk to him. He works on accessibility issues for blind computer users with Braille without borders. Then at around 7 pm we cooked Maggi in the kitchen with Medhamsh (http://medhamsh.org/) and Vignesh.
A little more about my PG. The PG was actually supposed to be a school. The front facade does say xyz school. The instead made a PG out of it. I guess it saves them some tax. Just adjacent top our PG there is a graveyard. A huge one. I look at it daily. Lets see if I can see something out of the ordinary some day
I got a new sim. My recently bought Nokia went into an infinite loop of screen-blinking after i used it and I had to make do with an old Motorola that Abhas has.
Its Sunday, 7:06 PM now, and I have no plans in mind. Lets see what lies ahead of me.
Bangalore Airport
I was sitting in Bngalore airport in one those Cafe Coffee Day stalls sipping cappucino when it occured to me to try to get connected to the wi fi connection in the airport. So I pulled out my laptop and soon enough I found a free wifi connection. It then asked me to send an sms to a number 56767 so i would get a password in a reply message so i could use it to surf. So I did the needful. I waited… and waited…. and waited, but no password arrived.
I boraded my flight, and after receiveing an unexpected call mid-take-off I promptly switched it off. A few hours later I was in a taxi approcahing Howrah station when I recieved the password in sms!
Well the service does work, but with a latency of around 2 hours.
Indic Meet 2009, Pune
I had the privilege of being invited to the Indic Meet 2009 held at the Red Hat office in Pune. It was organised by IndLinux. Here is the event details page and schedule. Here I shall present a personal view of the experience.
My flight landed an hour late at Pune airport at 12 midnight. It was my first flight and I thoroughly enjoyed it! I found Ramkrsna waiting for me outside and he took me to my hotel on his bike. Ravikant from Sarai was my room mate.
Next morning I met Gora and Shantanu for the first time. They had come to our room to say hi. We then made our way to the Red Hat office at Kalyani Nagar. I was also looking forward to meeting Shreyank who recently joined them. We are college friends.
At the venue I met many new people. I met Runa, Ravishankar Ji, Parag Nemade, Pravin Satpute, Rahul Bhalerao, Santhosh, Amitakhya, G. Karunakar . As soon as I reached the room a discussion on OCR ensued. Soon Mr. Sankarshan came in and the meet was underway. The rest of the proceedings were divided into 2 tracks, Localisation and Development. We moved to another room to discuss development.
The first session was on “Locales, and related work” by Parag and Rahul. There was an involved discussion on the various problems in glibc rules of collation and sorting rules. Santhosh shared his knowledge. I sat all the while learning stuff. Gora sitting beside me was frantically typing all the points made on the IndLinux wiki. Mr. Sankarshan would drop in from time to time to check whether we were working or gossiping
We heard that the localisation track was ahead of time and we moved to the localisation room after we were done. Soon after was lunch. It was decided that OCR be discussed with everyone since localisation track was ahead of schedule.
Next up was my presentation on Indic OCR. Here is the slide. There were a few questions which I was happy to answer. Next up were Gora and Shantanu presenting their own approach for the OCR problem. Ravishankar Ji gave a valuable input by demonstrating Sanskrit OCR later.
We then moved to another room and sat with a few language teams. People asked me to demonstrate how a new language is trained for the OCR. I decided to make training files for Tamil. We went to wikipedia and copied all the tamil characters in the alphabet and fed it into the trainer. We then took a screenshot of some tamil text from tamil wikipedia. We then ran the ocr and it gave reasonably good results. There was an issue with some of the vowel signs being messed up. We had an accuracy of around 85%. I was then requested to provide the instructions and make the process easier. I have since then made some changes to the code and committed some changes. I am yet to modify the README and blog about it in detail.
As the day came to a close, I went to Shreyank’s guest house and had some fun. We met Pradeepto who had come to meet us. I was very happy to see him. Later that evening we went to a restaurant and had sizzlers. Later that night I spoke to Ravikant at length about Sarai and his interests there.
The next day we started with Gujarati localisation. Pradeepto showed up at the office to say hi. I was thrilled to see him wearing our NIT DGP LUG Tshirt! We discussed some Python bits in the cafeteria. When I came back Runa was giving her talk on translation quality assurance which i found interesting. Ravikant gave his inputs on a recently held translation sprint he organised at Delhi.
Next up was Gora talking about dictionaries. He showed us in detail how to create a dictionary from scratch. Karunakar gave valuable inputs.
Post lunch there was a talk on Online handwriting recognition by Rahul which captured everyones attention. Santhosh gave so many talks, since he works on so many projects. I particularly liked the N-gram model word level suggestion engine he is trying to build. We discussed a few ideas. I also enjoyed G. Karunakar whenever he spoke. He is so damn cool!
I would also like to mention Sandeep Shedmake whose views on applying TQM to localisation seemed far fetched at the time, but was an excellent vision nevertheless. I had some discussion on that IRC later.
The day was drawing to a close and we found ourselves discussing what IndLinux meant. Venkatesh Hariharan came in and joined the discussion. We decided to change a lot of the wiki and web pages to make it more productive and lucid. There was also a lot of talk about setting up an IndLinux society. The day ended with people saying good byes and “see you at foss.in”
All in all the experience was thrilling for a student like me. I was probably the least knowledgable guy there and all I did was learn more. I will always rue not having a camera with me though. I am buying a camera a first thing with my first salary
Realisation
I received this picture in a forwarded mail. I felt I should share this with everyone.
Advice at 4 AM
I was watching this movie named “50 first dates” starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, when Abhishek pinged me. He said that there was a guy from IIIT Allahabd on out IRC channel (#nitdgplug on Freenode) who was seeking advice for starting a new LUG.
I know from my programming contest days that IIIT Allahabad has some of the best coders in India, maybe second only to IIIT Hyderabad. I knew we had to make this happen. The ensuing conversation can be read here.
