Localized Gujarati Geek

* Yes. I’m kicking myself for being lazy and not doing stuffs that I supposed to do before, during and after foss.in/2009. I had expected too much that never happened but something too good happened that I wasn’t able to imagine.

foss.in/2007 was my last foss.in visit where we had lots of fun. Really. But, along with that certain elements (ie Real Life) made it hard to let me enjoy that. Same happened during 2008. Pity. I missed KDE Song and what not..

But, this year – I determined and kicked myself several times. Real Life was kind of in happy mood. foss.in team helped me to figure out travel issues. So, I was all set.

All days were filled with fun, much better involvement (& RTFM) with Debian and then my small talk at KDE PoTD was surprise to me (and also to that Projector that never worked with my Macbook). I’ve made some cool friends – Ramkumar, Siddhesh, Shreyank, Rahul Sundaram and many more from Pai hotel discussion group!

For those who missed my stupid brown humor and PJs – next time. C ya at foss.in/2010!

And yes, I took only two pictures during entire conference. But, fossdotin flickr or picasa tag will say you what kind of fun we had.

* Day 1 was pretty good. We had really nice breakfast, after kind of okay-okay sleep due to late night hacking of memories with Kushl, Pradeepto and Siddhesh. We jumped into vehicle, dropped ourselves to venue and met Jace, Samay and other known faces there. Inside, there were few people.. But, we had very nice discussion with fellow speakers sitting near hackcenter area while watching schedule is updated on-the-fly.

Had nice interaction with Ramkumar and instead of working on Debian workout stuffs, noted to learn emacs (yeah, I’m vim guy ). Started it with small amount of dose. We settled around table #8 and will remain there. Kunal wanted to package some PHP stuff, he started with that. I uploaded yokadi without any fancy stuff (really, nothing). Started with looking into gwibber2. I rushed to hall #3 and introduced about ‘Debian workout’ but I think people were confused about my sudden introduction, Aanjhan was laughing on my crappy jokes on last seat. Anyway, I then went back, met Aanjhan after so many months, met some more people, peeped into wireshark packet capturing by Siddhesh.

Keynote by Dimitris Glezos, was amazing. We then headed to Aangan for dinner. It was entirely Kushal’s idea, so we were suspecting something about beerware, but alas, it was fantastic Punjabi food. We loved it. Return journey to hotel was NFS Rickshaw driving kind of.

Obviously, I’m not seating in Pradeepto-Aanjhan’s room with other fellows, writing this, lots of discussion on lots of random topics. Kushal’s jokes are coming at random() interval.

Day 1, it was..

* What am going to do there?

1. Debian Workout: Where we are going to get some more ‘people’ hacking on Debian packaging. My focus will be on collaborative-maintainance, RC Bug Fixes, things we could not finished last year (I wasn’t there, but Kapil took the lead..). Kunal & friends are very much interested in fixing some things in `reportbug’ – so it will be fun.
2. Debian Development BOF: This is all about things we did in ‘talks’ in last years. BOF is better than ‘talk’. I’m going to re-prove it!

* Long awaited CFP is out! Lets see how we represent Debian this time. Last year’s I missed it completely and I am also not sure about this year, but as always – I am excited

Go for it!

* It has been just 3 years since I uploaded my first package, Xosview!

xosview (1.8.2-10) unstable; urgency=low

* New Maintainer (Closes: #390066)
* standards-version to 3.7.2

– Kartik Mistry Fri, 29 Sep 2006 10:16:09 +0530

* When you are free and have any nice tip(s) that may be useful to our users/developers, just go to http://wiki.debian.org/FortunesDebianHints and add it there!

* I am looking for either assembled desktop or netbook suitable for my wife` K`. She refused to use my Macbook even it will be unused during daytime after I will be joining new place/job from Monday!

She asked: What will be OS in it?

Me: Linux.

She: Oh!

Me: What will you do with that machine?

She: Surfing, Email etc

Me: Then, why you should worry, dear

* I found (Thanks Pradeepto) this nice, geeky, commandline TODO application and instantly fall in ITP love. Yokadi is what you need.

The first task added in Yokadi was ‘To make Yokadi Debian package’…

* Sandro Tosi blogged about reportbug 4.o So, I decided to try it.

I was not able to see Desktop file for it and luckily found it inside Debian Menu (Why we need it, anyway?). It worked fine, fetched information about some bug and then I decided to go back – crash I am investigating it further during VAC or may be Sandro already knows about it

* It looks like people don’t know how and when to report bugs to Debian BTS. Following are some steps for them:

1. Fire terminal, type ‘reportbug’. Follow instructions. Use ‘reportbug-ng’ if needed! If you are not comfortable with terminal, firing a mail to ’submit@bugs.d.o’ with proper subject is fine. Look at example of any bugs. Its very easy.

2. If you are using ‘Sid’. Don’t forget to report bug when they are encounters.

3. File a bug, rather than crying about maintainer not responding and blah blah.

4. While updating system to Lenny, Keep such documents handy.

5. Ask

* I had private email with God today..