Debayan’s Weblog

IOTA= Institute of Open Technology and Aplications

After around 3-4 days of frantic preparaions, it was finally 26th December, the day i had been eagerly waiting for. We were heading to Science City kolkata to attend this. Our HOD S. Choudhury sir and I made our way from Durgapur to Kolkata in separate buses (because he missed our bus!). I had with me the 3 posters and a flex, along with my laptop bag and a separate bag for clothes etc. 

We took our seat a little late, but the schedule given by the organisers went for a toss. We passed time cracking jokes among ourselves and clicking pictures and shooting some video with Mayank’s handycam. I then saw Mr. Sankarshan and Sayamindu make their way to a corner of the auditorium. I was looking forward to meeting him since i read his tweets where he had mentioned that he was at Sayamindu’s place. So immediately went and met him, shook his and Sayamindu’s hand (there was another person with them, but i did not get his name). We exchanged a few words and then i came back to my seat.

After around 30 more minutes the much awaited moment came, RMS arrived, along with his girlfriend Dora. We knew things will start rolling soon. 

The inauguration somewhat strangely began with the ODF olympiad presentation and prize distribution ceremony. I was reminded of my school days when I too went on the stage so many times to speak about things I had no idea about. The presentations were not that interesting, but at their age, i had not even heard of the term opensource IIRC. So good for them. One thing to notice was that almost all the winners were girls, so the prizes were probably down to presentation skills. Prof. Shankar Sen spoke for a few moments with every prize winner.

After a few more short speeches, RMS started talking. He had this really cool little laptop with him. I saw him working in text mode all the time. He started his talk with saying that he disagreed with everything that everyone before him had said about opensource, because he does not like the term. He then talked about the 4 freedoms that a user should have for a software to be libre. His talk meandered through topics such as anti-public laws being enacted by the government, tight security checks proving to be a big hassle for guests, and the US government being the biggest terrorist in the world. 

As soon as his talk entered the technical realm, people started leaving the hall. Infact, almost all ODF olympiad winners also left one by one. They probably had flights to catch. He kind of got agitated and said “Why are so many people leaving?”.

His talk continued for a few more minutes and then he gave the media present a good camera clicking frenzy by wearing a cloak and a hat and proclaiming himself as the Saint of IGNUcius. It was pretty amusing.

Then came the question and answer session. He could not understand most of the questions that were asked because of differences in pronunciation, and IT minister Debesh Das acted as his translator for a shot while. I also asked a question about the development of programming languages in the future, which he answered very well.

At the end of the day, we met Nandini mam and confirmed the time for the interview that we were to take of RMS. SC Sir and I headed to our accommodation at Ultadanga. He told me a lot of interesting stories about his childhood and college life. It was nice to see that side of his personality.

The next morning was all business. It was the day of our exhibition. We set up the stall a little late. We shared our stall with a group named computer jagat. They are a group of student and faculty from Jadavpur University who publish a Bengali magazine on Computing technologies, including Windows. It is a nice initiative and they are doing quie well.

On our left was the Fedora-ilug-cal stall. To our right was the CDAC stall. The other stalls were that of Conversys Technologies-ubuntu and ORCA screen reader.

After we put up the posters and the flex, I got a chance to speak to Mr. Sankarshan on a few topics, including the latest work being done at RedHat, my OCR project, and some unicode issues. He speaks softly, and his eyes remain the same inspite of his varying emotions. He was also heavier than I expected him to be (i did not lift him though ). He remembered one of my earlier blogs and asked Susmit to give me a Fedora TShirt, which was very nice of him. He introduced me to Mandar Mitra from ISI, who is a relatively young Ph.D, and a very cool person indeed. He gave me many sugestions on my OCR project. 

As the crowds starting coming, mainly during the lunch, people thronged the stalls that wee giving away free DVDs. The Fedora stall was the most populated, and they had pretty cool stuff to show, like live usb station, DVDs, artwork, tshitrs etc. People came to our stall asking about our projects and we enjoyed answering their questions.

Mr. Sankarshan asked me to demo the deskewing algorithm in the code i added to tesseract, and it failed infront of him, which was pretty embarassing to me, but he said “No issues, you have been hit by Murphy”. I later realised that the image was in RGB format, and it was supposed to be in grayscale to work properly. hmmph.

We had our lunch, which was pretty good. I also met RMS and shook his hand. We were supposed to interview him that day but he did not stay and went away, which had us worried, but Nandini mam fixed an appointment for us at his guest house the following the day in the morning.

So the next morning I reached quite early at his guest house in the Salt Lake electronic complex. Ultimately Mayank Shreyank and Anima came. We then went to RMS’ room and he asked us to wait in the lobby. I interviewed him while Mayank shot the video. There were some funny moments, for example, he asked me to wear a sweater to cover the fedora t shirt i was wearing because he did not recommend fedora as a distribution. He also pointed out some errors in my questions, and made it a little difficult for me, but in the end it was pretty good. We shall release the video during Mukti.

Then we made our way to Science City for the final leg of the exhibition. This turned out to be a very productive day for me personally. I met 2 people from CDAC and one from jadavpur who were working on OCR too, and asked me *many* questions, some pretty tough ones. One of them from CDAC  had been doing the same character segmentation work for the last 2 years or so at CDAC. He told me that he was ready to share algorithms and test data with me , but not source code. His OCR system was working with a 80% accuracy and was not good enough for production use yet.

Then Indranil convened an informal meet of the local lugs present there. We talked about having a common event calendar among other things. Looking forward to working with them in the future.

All in all, it was a very enriching experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it. People appreciated our projects, and we got a lot of exposure. The juniors now no what they are supposed to do. In my and Shreyank’s opinion the event was a great success in the sense that you could see a lot of senior people in circles talking about the free software philosophy and copyright issues during and after the event, which was really nice to see.

I discovered that you’d never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.
For example, I didn’t know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I’d be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me.
Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.
* ion has quit IRC (Ping timeout)
brings a tear to my eye… :’) so true..
So if you’re starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with “Linux is gay because it can’t do XXX like Windows can”. You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems.
this person must be a kindred spirit of mine

Taken from http://bash.org/?152037

This is the lua script in ocropus 0.3 release that deskews a page image. It did not work for me. Kept giving this error:

ocroscript: ocroscript/scripts/deskew.lua:9: attempt to call global ‘make_DeskewPageByRAST’ (a nil value)
stack traceback:
ocroscript/scripts/deskew.lua:9: in main chunk
[C]: ?

I used google, and found this. It worked well. The code is:

-proc = make_DeskewPageByRAST()

+proc = ocr.make_DeskewPageByRAST()

input = bytearray:new() output = bytearray:new()

-read_image_gray(input,arg[1])

+iulib.read_image_gray(input,arg[1])

proc:cleanup(output,input)

-write_png(arg[2],output)

So it was basically an issue of wrong namespaces.

Result is:

This is what i got as a search result just now:

• It is fnally winter here. I was starting to think that we will no longer have winters here.
• Vignesh left today for his sys admin course in Sikkim. I feel kinda lonely. Yesterday went on a 6 hour long bike trip. Explored areas I never knew existed here.
• Lua is a scripting language and i need to learn that to work with ocropus.
• Blogging properly after a long time.
• Pretty confused at this point of time. Lots of things at hand. Mukti is coming along nicely. My fellowship work is also pressing on me now. Also plan to work on Gnome.
• Gotta fix the talk/workshop schedules for January.
• Plan to spend the new year in Digha.
• I forgot to bring along my room key. So I am parked in Sandeep’s vacated room. I broke the lock once before and the latch wont be able to take another hard beating, I am pretty sue about that.
• Our Glug has a new logo, which I do not like, and we got T-shirts printed with the wrong logo and the wrong name. Also, the stickers we printed are now old.
• Looking forward to interviewing RMS in Kolkata.
• Today, my HOD, SC Sir, sat with us at LH more and chatted about open source and the necessity of students to et involved into projects. He managed to inspire Subhojit, an excellent musician here studying CSE, to pursue music processing library development. I suggested him to contact Sachin joshi and look into CMU Sphynx.
• I think i deserve an openSUSE TShrit. If i remember correctly, I got openSUSE installed in no less than 100 computers in the college. Fedora ambassadors, I am so jealous of you :-X
• I want someone to give a talk on the Indian FOSS community here. IDG seems like the perfect person.
• Just 3 months left for active college life. I am so sad already
• hmmph…

pen-GUI-n

penGUIn is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) designing contest, which will test your skills in various GUI designing tools available on Linux. Some of the tools/Programming Languages that can be used are: Java, wxPython, GTK, QT, PyQT, PyGTK, etc. The participants may have to work on some FOSS and design GUIs for some command-line programs which do not have a graphical user interface. The maximum no of participants allowed in a team is 2.

The event will be organized in two rounds:

1. The Online Round: The problem statements of the online round will be put up on the website by 15th January. Participants have to submit their entries in the form of the software and a report write-up with screenshots.  The submissions for the online round will end on 22nd January. The results will be announced on 26th Jan.
2. On-Stage Finals: Around 8 teams will be selected from the online round for the final round which will be held in NIT Durgapur during Mukti ‘09 (6th to 8th Feb). If the participation is more in the online round, then we can consider more entries for the final round. Participants would have to make their GUI’s better and feature rich, before they present their software to a panel of judges.

As a build-up to this event, various workshops will be organized in January in NIT Durgapur by the students and professionals in the Industry.

Problem Statement:

1. Design a graphical user interface for Clive ( http://clive.sourceforge.net/ ).

Clive is a command line utility for extracting videos from Youtube and other video sharing Web sites. It was originally written to bypass the Adobe Flash requirement needed to view the hosted videos. It is non-interactive, meaning it can work in the background while the user is not logged on. This allows the user to start an extraction and disconnect from the system, letting clive finish the work.

Check out various options from man page. The GUI must implement as many features as possible apart from the mandatory features.

Mandatory Features:

i)It should also allow the user to specify the download directory.
ii)It should allow users to rename the file before downloading.
iii)It should not overwrite any existing file with same name.

New features are welcome.
You can download the source from http://clive.sourceforge.net/index.shtml .

2. Design a network tool to sniff packets on a LAN. It should be able to recognize packets of all multimedia broadcasts that are currently hosted on the LAN, eg Radio or any video broadcast streams, etc. The GUI must give sufficient information on each broadcast like the IP address of the broadcasting machine, the protocol used to broadcast, etc. More features are welcome.

Your GUI will be judged on the basis of usability and handling.

Deadline for submission of entries : January 20, 2009

Ten entries will be selected from prelims. The selected teams are expected to attend Mukti ‘09 and present their projects. They are free to improve their entries once they know of their selection into the final round.

Checklist for prelims :
1. Full source code
2. Executables if any
3. Proper documentation about installation and use

NOTE:- Maximum number of participants per team is 2