Balasankar C

Balasankar C

Geek. Freedom. Privacy.

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FOSS contributions in 2019

Heyo, I have been interested in the concept of Freedom - both in the technical and social ecosystems for almost a decade now. Even though I am not a harcore contributor or anything, I have been involved in it for few years now - as an enthusiast, a contributor, a mentor, and above all an evangelist. Since 2019 is coming to an end, I thought I will note down what all I did last year...
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DebUtsav Kochi 2018

Heyo, Been quite some time since I wrote about anything. This time, it is Debutsav. When it comes to full-fledged FOSS conferences, I usually am an attendee or at most a speaker. I have given some sporadic advices and suggestions to few in the past, but that was it. However, this time I played the role of an organizer. DebUtsav Kochi is the second edition of Debian Utsavam, the celebration of Free Software by Debian...
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FOSSAsia 2018 - Singapore

Heyo, So I attended my first international FOSS conference - FOSSAsia 2018 at Lifelong learning institute, Singapore. I presented a talk titled “Omnibus - Serve your dish on all the tables” (slides, video) about the tool Chef Omnibus which I use on a daily basis for my job at GitLab. The conference was a 4-day long one and my main aim was to network with as many people as I...
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Introduction to Git workshop at CUSAT

Heyo, It has been long since I have written somewhere. In the last year I attended some events, like FOSSMeet, DeccanRubyConf, GitLab’s summit and didn’t write anything about it. The truth is, I forgot I used to write about all these and never got the motivation to do that. Anyway, last week, I conducted a workshop on Git basics for the students of CUSAT. My real plan, as always, was to do a bit...
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SMC/IndicProject Activities- ToDo List

Heyo, So, M.Tech is coming to an end I should probably start searching for a job soon. Still, it seems I will be having a bit of free time from Mid-September. I have got some plans about the areas I should contribute to SMC/Indic Project. As of now, the bucket list is as follows:

  1. Properly tag versions of fonts in SMC GitLab repo - I had taken over the package fonts-smc from Vasudev,...
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GSoC Final Report

Heyo, It is finally the time to wind up the GSoC work on which I have been buried for the past three months. First of all, let me thank Santhosh, Hrishi and Vasudev for their help and support. I seem to have implemented, or at least proved the concepts that I mentioned in my initial proposal. A spell checker that can handle inflections in root word and generate suggestion in the same inflected form...
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4 Days. 22 Hours. LaTeX.

Heyo folks, One of the stuff I love doing is teaching what I know to others. Though it is a Cliché dialogue, I know from experience that when we teach others our knowledge expands. From 10 students, you often get 25 different doubts and minimum 5 of them would be ones you haven’t even thought yourself earlier. In that way, teaching drives a our curiosity to find out more. I was asked to take...
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Kerala State IT Policy - A Stakeholder Consultation

Heyo folks, Last Saturday, that is 16th July, I attendeda a meeting regarding the upcoming Kerala State IT Policy. It was a stakeholder consultation organized by DAKF, Software Freedom Law Centre and Ernakulam Public Library Infopark branch. The program was presided by Prasanth Sugathan of SFLC (I had met him during Swatanthra, when I helped Praveen in the Privacy track) and was inaugurated by M. P Sukumaran Nair, advisor to the Minister of Industries. The...
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GSoC Update: Week #7 and #8

Heyo, Last two weeks were seeing less coding and more polishing. I was fixing the LibIndic modules to utilize the concept of namespace packages (PEP 420) to obtain the libindic.module structure. In the stemmer module, I introduced the namespace package concept and it worked well. I also made the inflector a part of stemmer itself. Since inflector's functionality was heavily dependent on the output of the stemmer, it made more sense to make inflector...
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GSoC Update: Week #5 and #6

Heyo, Last two weeks were spent mostly in getting basic spellchecker module to work. In the first week, I tried to polish the stemmer module by organizing tags for different inflections in an unambiguous way. These tags were to be used in spellchecker module to recreate the inflected forms of the suggestions. For this purpose, an inflector module was added. It takes the output of stemmer module and reverses its operations. Apart from that, I...
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GSoC Update: Week #3 and #4

Heyo, [Sorry for the delay in the post] I spent the last two weeks mainly testing out the stemmer module and the defined rules. During that I found out there are many issues for a rule based model because different types of inflections to different parts of speech can yield same inflected form. This can be solved only by machine learning algorithm that incorporates a morphological analyzer and is hence out of scope of my...
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GSoC Update: Week #1 and #2

Heyo, Last two weeks of GSoC mostly involved working on Stemmer module of the proposal. I had discussions with Hrishi and Vasudev regarding the directory structure that I will be using for the stummer. I proposed .. format because it gives more visibility to libindic. Since both of them agreed (I will be converting all the existing modules to this format, after GSoC), I first ported the existing indicstemmer module to this directory...
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GSoC Community Bonding - VibhakthiGenerator

Hi, So the community bonding period of Google Summer of Code 2016 comes to an end today. During this period, the participants were expected to mingle with the community, get to know more about its basic workflow, make small small contributions to the projects undertaken by community, understand the coding standards, deployement models and version control schemes, the communication model used etc.

VibhakthiGenerator

I have been contributing to the community before GSoC, in form of...
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In for GSoC

Heyo, So, I am in for Google Summer of Code as my project "Inflection Aware Spellchecker for Malayalam" got accepted under Indic Project. I will be implementing a spellchecker that can handle the problem of inflections in Malayalam language on top of the LibIndic framework. I am happy that I got Hrishi a.k.a Stultus, whom I have known for the past 4 years, as my mentor for this project. Also, it...
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Debian Packaging - The mentoring days

Heyo, From the last blog entries, I think it can be guessed that I am seriously into Debian packaging. I have been maintaining ~80 Ruby packages that are dependencies of Diaspora, Gitlab etc and the packaging work surely helped to kick my technical knowledge up a notch. Since I believe in the idea of "Our knowledge becomes polished when we teach/share it" (attribute it to the fact that I come from a family full...
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Using Python and odfpy to create Open Document Texts

Heyo,
I have been doing a project for my college, which involved a question paper generation module. I initially relied on LaTex for doing the job and compiling the question paper as pdf from it. But, the staff may sometimes need to edit the questions on the fly before generating a pdf. So, it...
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A Gemfile parser in Python

Heyo,
There were times when I thought I should go with both Python and Ruby and thus get a firm grip in both languages. But, it seems, I am no longer motivated to code in Ruby. So, I decided to stick with Python for all my coding purposes. But, there were some stuff that I use, which is already written in Ruby by someone else. So, what to do except porting it to Python?...
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National Flag Profile Picture, Nationalism, Free Basic, Internet.org and the sack over our faces.

It seems everyone is happy changing their profile pictures in Facebook to the "Digital India" tricolor filtered one using Facebook's Digital India app. Of course, everyone sees this as an act of patriotism and support to our nation's prosperous journey towards technical advancement. There is a small issue though. And, even though it is a doubt and assumption now, due to previous experiences there is a high chance it will be proven right. I...
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Trying out Diaspy - ICU and Commitstrip bots for D*

Heyo, As you may know, I am a long time supporter and user of Diaspora, the free, decentralized, Privacy-aware social networking platform. I also am one of the podmins of a Diaspora instance (called pod) - Poddery. One of the main things missing in Diaspora is a stable and usable API which prevented me from using it programatically. But recently, I came to know about Diaspy, which is an unofficial Python interface for...
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My 2^10 days of packaging

Heyo folks, Today, out of the blue, I decided to check how many days have gone since I was first introduced to packaging by Praveen. From my blog post entry, it was on October 20, 2012 when I joined an IRC training conducted by Praveen. It was for the packaging of Diaspora and in general that of ruby gems. And today, 1024 days had passed since I first tried my hands in packaging....
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Rahasya - Privacy aware Daily Journal

Heyo,
I've always wanted to try out the concept of Daily Journal, where I write everything (well, almost everything. If I could remember everything you would've already seen me as topper of exams. :P) happened each day and whatever comes to mind regarding them openly. But the main factor that kept me back was the fear of someone else reading my diary (or more precisely, due to my nature of keeping things "secure" I...
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Lenovo G5030 WiFi Disabled in Linux Mint

Heyo folks,
Recently, I bought a Lenovo G5030 Laptop for my father. The first thing I did, was install GNU/Linux in it. Since it was for my father, I installed Linux Mint 17.1 in it. It detected Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth automatically. But the issue was, WiFi was disabled. I tried clicking the toggle button in Network Panel (from the network applet in bottom panel). But, it never got enabled. So, I decided to...
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Debian Ruby Packaging error - invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

Heyo,
During the packaging of some gems, I got the weird error - "invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII". Since I knew US-ASCII was something related to languages, I found out pretty quickly that it was something related to the locales setting of the package. It seems the necessary locales were not getting installed in the build environment.
To solve the error
1. Add locales to Build-Depends
2. Add Read More

RTL8723BE Internet (Wi-Fi) down after some time in Linux Mint (and possibly Ubuntu too)

Hi,
I have been making my friends migrate from Windows to GNU/Linux. Since they were extreme begineers I installed Linux Mint on their computers. Most of the systems worked perfectly with a windows-gnulinux dual boot. But some new HP systems had the "feature" that only one OS can be installed at a time. However, I convinced them to remove Windows (Yay me!!) and installed Linux Mint only.
In those two systems, the Wireless...
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Debian GitLab Packaging Diaries #3 (June 26 - July 3)

Heyo folks,
Last two weeks was a bit of a packaging time for me. Also, Praveen was sponsored $3000 by Gitlab, for the packaging work and he started it a few days back (check for #debian-gitlab-months in Diaspora). That meant my packages were uploaded quicker, :D. The packages I worked on are

  1. omniauth-multipassword -- OmniAuth strategy to use different password strategies
  2. slack-nofitier -- Ruby wrapper for posting to slack webhooks
  3. ...
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Debian GitLab Packaging Diaries #2 - Ruby 2.2 transition and mono-logger FTBFS

Heyo folks,
I had packaged the gem mono-logger as part of GitLab packaging. It was a dependency of resque, which in turn was a dependency of devise_async. At that time, Ruby 2.1 was the official version of Debian and packages were build based on that. However, recently, Antonio had updated ruby-defaults adding Ruby 2.2 to the list of supported interpreters. Along with that, Cédric had uploaded RSpec 3.0 to...
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Debian GitLab Packaging Diaries #1 - rotp

Heyo folks,
Last few days was a little tight as I am having my internal exams. However, I packaged the gem rotp with some great help from Cedric. This packaging made me do a variety of tasks. I'll list out them below

  1. Since the source code contained jquery embedded, lintian was unhappy in the first try and I had to repackage the gem with a -dfsg suffix. This involved adding a gbp.conf...
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publish2wp - Wordpress Publisher

Heyo folks,
I am pretty sure you all know about the numerous wordpress publishing scripts out there. Still, I wrote one. Why? Just to scratch my personal itch. I am not at all interested in opening up my browser (Mozilla Firefox) which actually is a memory thief. I would be in heaven if I could just do everything via the command line. So, writing posts was a "should-i-do-it-or-not" task for me always, just because...
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Debian GitLab Packaging Diaries #0

Heyo folks,
Since last year, I am part of Debian Ruby team where we are packaging different ruby gems to make them apt-gettable (and save the users from learning rvm). As mentioned in earlier posts, I started with Diaspora packaging and have packaged some gems needed for that (mainly some redis-* gems and fog-* gems). Since, Diaspora packaging is almost over, I am slightly moving towards packaging GitLab for Debian....
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Debian Jessie Release Party @ Kochi

Howdy,

25th of April, 2015 was an important day in the lives of Free Software enthusiasts. Debian released its 8th version - named Jessie (as always, from the Toy Story movie series) on that day. It was relesed after about 2 years of rigorous testing and debugging and would surely be the most stable one of all. As part of the release, there were release parties organized all [over the world](https://wiki.debian.org/ReleasePartyJessie/). About 13...
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nmcli and adhoc wifi hotspot (a.k.a File sharing made easy by Python and nmcli)

Heyo,
Just like you, I was also using pendrives to transfer movies from my friends' laptops to mine. Yesterday, when I was at Thiruvananthapuram with SMC members for the annual meet and Swathanthra conference, Hrishi told me about python's SimpleHTTPServer package which can be used to create an HTTP Server running at any directory. Along with that, if we create an adhoc wifi-hotspot in our laptop, we can easily transfer files from...
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Celebrating Deepavali Differently - DebUtsav '14

Heyo,
We celebrated Deepavali a little early and a little differently. It was Free Culturised, :D. Yeah folks, I am definitely talking about the DebUtsav '14 that happened in Amrita Vishwavidyapeetom, Kollam last week (October 17-18). It was truly one hell of an event. The wowness lies in knowing that the event rocked even when about 90% of the audience were sweeped away due to some unfortunate happenings. The registered number was...
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Connecting to Wifi hot spots through command line

Heyo,
For quite a few days, I have been trying different ways to connect to a wireless network (protected through WPA-PSK) via command line a.k.a cli. I tried using wpa_supplicant, iwconfig, editing /etc/network/interfaces etc. Silly me, I was not looking at the great "NetworkManager" which happen to have a cli version. It is called nmcli.
The following are the steps to connect to a wifi accesspoint from cli
1. List out all...
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Back to Pack(aging)

Howdy all,
I was introduced to the world of packaging by Praveen (a.k.a javaman), one year back. It was a training session for packaging diaspora gems for debian (so that diaspora can finally be installed by sudo apt-get install diaspora). I tried packing one package named jammit and I think I stopped it when I found that, it had some dependencies yet to be packaged. And as usual, I had found...
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CLI#1 : The Vim Editor

Howdy all,
So, as posted earlier, this is my first post on the series of various CLI tools I use.
In this post I'll be discussing about an awesome CLI text editor - The Vi Editor. Well specifically, its modified version - The Vim Editor. Before beginning, I have to make a declaration. I am totally not interested in the editor war and have no grudge against Emacs. When I...
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The CLI way.

Howdy all, It recently occured to me that, the best school I ever got was the Internet (After that, comes my friends). So, it is my social responsibility to give something back to them (Yeah, Internet is never an "it" for me, but "them". Internet Is Real). So, I decided to write something here frequently that I gained from Internet. It is hereby stated that all the content below was gained from one...
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Goodbye Facebook

Howdy,
I am extremely happy to announce that I no longer will be using Facebook for the following activities (which, pretty much is everything I used it for before)
  1. Sharing a status
  2. Uploading photos or videos
  3. Comments
  4. Re-sharing posts
  5. Likes


This is in association with the Reset The Net campaign initiated by two organizations - Fight for the Future and Center for Rights . This...
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Ruby on Rails

Howdy,
As per my New Year Resolution of 2014, I started learning Ruby on Rails. As usual, by 4 months, I had learned 4 lines. But, fortunately, it was time for my university exams. And, just like routine, I was super excited to do stuff (anything) other than studying for exams. I am most productive on the days just before my exams. So, I decided to reboot my Rails learning....
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Typing Malayalam in Android

നമസ്കാരം, മലയാളത്തെ ഇഷ്ടപ്പെടുന്നവർക്ക് ഒരു സന്തോഷവാർത്തയുമായാണ് ഈ ബ്ലോഗ് പോസ്റ്റ്. ആൻഡ്രോയിഡ് ഫോണുകളിൽ മലയാളമടക്കം 15 ഭാഷകൾ ടൈപ്പ് ചെയ്യാൻ സഹായിക്കുന്ന ഒരു പുതിയ ആപ്ലിക്കേഷൻ രംഗത്തെത്തിയിരിക്കുന്നു. തിരുവനന്തപുരത്തെ ഐസിഫോസ് എന്ന സ്ഥാപനവുമായി ഒത്തുചേർന്ന് ഈ ആപ്ലിക്കേഷൻ നിർമ്മിച്ചത് "സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ്" എന്ന സംഘടനയിലെ ശ്രീ. ജിഷ്ണു മോഹൻ ആണ്. ആൻഡ്രോയിഡ് 4.1 (ജെല്ലിബീൻ) അല്ലെങ്കിൽ അതിനു് മുകളിലുള്ള പതിപ്പുകളോ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്നവർക്ക് ഈ ആപ്ലിക്കേഷൻ ഗൂഗിൾ പ്ലേസ്റ്റോറിൽ നിന്നും ഡൗൺലോഡ് ചെയ്ത് എടുക്കാവുന്നതാണ്. ( ലിങ്ക് - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.smc.inputmethod.indic ). ഇനി എന്റെ പോസ്റ്റിന്റെ ഉദ്ദേശം. എങ്ങനെയാണ് മലയാളത്തിൽ ടൈപ്പ് ചെയ്യുക എന്ന് പലരും എന്നോട് ചോദിക്കാറുണ്ട്. മേൽപ്പറഞ്ഞ...
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സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യദിനാഘോഷം @ തൃശ്ശൂർ

ഇന്ന് (സെപ്റ്റംബര്‍ 21, 2013) ലോകത്ത് എമ്പാടും സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യദിനം ആഘോഷിക്കുന്നതിന്റെ ഭാഗമായി, സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിന്റെ നേതൃത്വത്തില്‍, തൃശ്ശൂര്‍ സാഹിത്ര അക്കാദമിയിലെ ചങ്ങമ്പുഴ ഹാളില്‍ വെച്ച്, സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യദിനം വളരെയധികം ഭംഗിയായി ആഘോഷിച്ചു. ശ്രീ കെ വേണു ഉദ്ഘാടനം ചെയ്ത ചടങ്ങില്‍, തൃശ്ശൂര്‍ പിജി സെന്ററിലെ രഞ്ജിത്ത് മാഷ് ആയിരുന്നു അദ്ധ്യക്ഷൻ. വേണുമാഷ് സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍ സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യത്തിന്റെ രാഷ്ട്രീയ, സാമൂഹിക മാനങ്ങളെ പറ്റിയും, സുതാര്യത, സ്വകാര്യത എന്നിവയെ പറ്റിയും അത്യാവശ്യം ആഴത്തില്‍ തന്നെ സംസാരിച്ചു. DAKFനെ പ്രതിനിധീകരിച്ച് സുദര്‍ശൻ മാഷും, പരിഷത്തിനെ പ്രതിനിധീകരിച്ച് സുധീര്‍ മാഷും പങ്കെടുത്തു.എം ഇ എസ് എഞ്ചി. കോളേജിലെ അധ്യാപകന്‍ ഡോ. സികെ രാജു,കവി അന്‍വര്‍ അലി എന്നിവരും സ്വതന്ത്ര...
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FOSS ലോകത്തെ ലൈസൻസുകൾ

FOSS ലോകത്തെ അനുമതികൾ ഒരു പ്രയോഗം, ഏതൊക്കെ രീതിയിൽ ഉപയോഗിക്കാം എന്ന് രേഖപ്പെടുത്തി വയ്ക്കുന്ന സംവിധാനമാണ് ലൈസൻസിങ്ങ്. മറ്റൊരാൾക്ക് കാണാൻ മാത്രം, കാണാനും തിരുത്താനും, കണ്ട് തിരുത്തി വേറൊരു പേരിൽ പുറത്തിറക്കാൻ, ഇങ്ങനെ പലരീതിയിലും അനുമതി ഏർപ്പെടുത്താം. സ്വതന്ത്ര പ്രയോഗം ലോകത്തെ, ചില അനുമതികളെ (ലൈസൻസുകളെ) പറ്റി പറയാം. GNU General Public License ആദ്യമായി, ഗ്നു സാർവ്വ ജനിക അനുമതി അഥവാ GNU General Public License എന്നതിനെ പറ്റി പറയാം. സ്വതന്ത്ര അനുമതികളിൽ ഏറ്റവും മുൻപന്തിയിൽ കേൾക്കുന്ന ഒരു പേരാണ് ഇത്. Free Software Foundationന്റെ ഭാഗമായി റിച്ചാർഡ് സ്റ്റാൾമാനാണ് ഈ അനുമതി ഉണ്ടാക്കിയത്. ഈ അനുമതി, സ്വതന്ത്ര പ്രയോഗം ഫൗണ്ടേഷൻ പറയുന്ന...
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How is FOSS good for the common man? - My views

I've been asked "how the common people benefit from free software?? They don't understand code, so how does the source code being available benefits them?? Open source is only developer oriented. Its not for common people.." many a times. There can be a large paragraph of answer for these questions, but I like to keep it simple. Open source provides security to the common man, from the possible frauds. The funny thing is, that security...
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Rooting and Installing Malayalam Font in Micromax Canvas 2 A110 with Official Jelly Bean ROM

Hi all,
I was disappointed to find that my new Micromax Canvas 2 A110 (then having Android ICS) was not supporting Malayalam. Then I heard the good news, Micromax released Jelly Bean update for it. Hoping that it would satisfy my need, I rushed to the service centre and upgraded my phone to Jelly Bean. DAMN!!, still no Malayalam. I was afraid to root my phone, because it will void my warranty. Then, out...
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Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

നമസ്കാരം,
എന്റെ കൂട്ടുകാരിൽ ചിലരെങ്കിലും ഞാൻ മുട്ടിന് മുട്ടിന് Open Source എന്ന് വിളിച്ചു പറഞ്ഞോണ്ട് നടക്കുന്നത് കണ്ടിട്ടുണ്ടാവും. എന്താണ് ഈ ഓപ്പൺ സോഴ്സ് എന്ന് എന്നെക്കൊണ്ട് പറ്റുന്ന രീതിയിൽ പറയാം.

പ്രൊപ്രൈറ്ററി സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയർ

സാധാരണ രീതിയിൽ നിങ്ങൾ ഒരു സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയർ വാങ്ങുകയാണെങ്കിൽ, നിങ്ങൾക്ക് അത് ഉപയോഗിക്കാനുള്ള അവകാശം മാത്രമേ ലഭിക്കൂ. അതിന്റെ പ്രവർത്തനം എങ്ങനെ ആണെന്ന് പഠിക്കാനോ, അല്ലെങ്കിൽ അത് മറ്റൊരാളുമായി പങ്കുവെയ്ക്കുവാനോ സാധിക്കില്ല. നിയമവിരുദ്ധമായി അത് പങ്കുവെച്ചാൽ, നിങ്ങൾക്കെതിരെ നിയമനടപടികൾക്ക് പോവാൻ ആ സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയർ ഇറക്കിയ കമ്പനിക്ക് അവകാശമുണ്ട്. ഇത്തരം സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറുകളുടെ പ്രശ്നങ്ങൾ പറഞ്ഞുകൊണ്ട് തന്നെ തുടങ്ങാം ആദ്യം

    ...
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Why Diaspora

Note : Updated. Details of "Save Poddery Campaign" added at the end. Do check it out.

Hi all,
I believe many of you have heard about information being leaked by NSA from top ranked websites like Google, Facebook and Twitter etc. In the current socio-economic scenario, information is the most valuable asset. It is much more...
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Diaspora v0.1.0.0

Ahoy,
It is a fscinating news to those in the FOSS world that their favourite open source social networking platform - DIASPORA has released its new version - v0.1.0.0 ( I ask the creators, the hell dudes?? why not v1.0.0.0. Why a preceding 0?? ). This one is a toast to the tongue as it comes with a brand new set of cool and amazing features and I plan to share (good artists copy,...
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Python Class

Howdy all,
Planned and exeuted (both done by gem) a python training session in IRC tonight. Stultus, Jishnu and Ershad were happy to help us learn the basics of python programming. Later it was more like a collective teaching-learning session. The members were me, Akshay, Nandaja, Dileep, Shafeeq and Aravind. The session covered variables and for and while loops. Hope this session continues for some time... (ഹൃഷിയുടെ മാനേജർ ഉടനെ എങ്ങും തിരിച്ചു വരല്ലേ... ) PS...
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സർവം മഗ്ര മയം...

ഹല!!,
ഇന്നലെ മുതൽ ഫേസ്ബുക്ക് മുതൽ മഗ്രയോട് മഗ്ര... കൂട്ടത്തിൽ എന്റെ വകയും കിടക്കട്ടെ എന്ന് കരുതി ഞാനും ഇട്ടു രണ്ടുമൂന്നെണ്ണം..
ഇനി ഈ മഗ്ര എന്താണെന്നല്ലേ,
ഫേസ്ബുക്കിലൊക്കെ നല്ല പൊളപ്പൻ ഇംഗ്ലീഷ് വാക്യങ്ങളോട് കൂടിയ കവർ ഫോട്ടോകൾ കാണുമ്പോൾ ആഗ്രഹിക്കാറില്ലേ, ഇങ്ങനത്തെ ഐറ്റം നമ്മടെ മലയാളത്തിലും ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നെങ്കിൽ എന്ന്?? (ഞാൻ കൊതിക്കാറുണ്ടായിരുന്നു)...
ആ കൊതിക്കൊരു ഉത്തരമാണ് മഗ്ര...
മഗ്ര = മലയാളം + ഗ്രാഫിക്സ് + കാലിഗ്രാഫി... ഓറിയോൺ, ഹിരൺ എന്നീ രണ്ട് ചങ്ങായിമാരാണ് ഈ ചടങ്ങ് തുടങ്ങി വച്ചത്.... ഇന്നലെ ഒരു ഫേസ്ബുക്ക് പേജ് തുടങ്ങി (ഇതാ)... പിന്നങ്ങോട്ട് പൊടിപാറ്റണ ആക്ടിവിറ്റിയായിരുന്നു... പോസ്റ്റോട് പോസ്റ്റ്......
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FOSSMeet

Howdy all,
Its already late to mention about the first FOSS event I attended, which was FOSSMeet at NIT-C (Feb 22- 24). Saw the brochure of the event @ FB and decided to attend it anyway. One of my friend, Akshay was also interested and we decided to go together. When I told my bro about the event, he also showed interest and agreed to join us. Later one of his students,...
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My first "usable" software - tiff2djvu

Howdy all,
Last day I created an app called tiff2djvu, mainly intended for wikisource users. It is for Ubuntu OS (I haven't tested on others) and is written using Python. While using Scan Tailor to correct scanned images, the outputs are TIFF images. Inorder to upload them to wikisource, we need to convert them to a single DJVU file. This software does this purpose. Thanks for Manojettan for the idea and Hrishi for technical...
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എന്റെ ആദ്യത്തെ വിക്കി ആഘോഷം

പ്രിയപ്പെട്ടവരെ,
ഈ കഴിഞ്ഞ ഞായറാഴ്ച (23/10/2012) ഞാന്‍ എന്റെ ജീവിതത്തിലെ ആദ്യ വിക്കി ആഘോഷത്തില്‍ പങ്കെടുത്തു. മലയാളം വിക്കിപീഡിയയുടെ പത്താം വാര്‍ഷികം ആയിരുന്നു അത്.
കലൂര്‍ റിന്യൂവല്‍ സെന്ററില്‍ വച്ചായിരുന്നു ചടങ്ങ്. ഓണ്‍ലൈനില്‍ കൂടി മാത്രം പരിചയം ഉണ്ടായിരുന്ന മനോജേട്ടം, അഖിലന്‍ എന്നിങ്ങനെ കുറേ പേരെ അവിടെ വച്ച് "ജീവനോടെ" കാണാന്‍ സാധിച്ചു.
രാവിലെ 10.00 മണിയോടെ ചടങ്ങുകള്‍ ആരംഭിച്ചു. ശ്രീ. പ്രകാശ് ബാരെ, ശ്രീ. ബാലചന്ദ്രന്‍ (ബാബുജി), ശ്രീ. സഹദേവന്‍ എന്നിവരായിരുന്നു മുഖ്യാതിഥികള്‍. ഉദ്ഘാടനം ചെയ്യാന്‍ നിശ്ചയിച്ചിരുന്നത് ശ്രീ. കെ ജയകുമാറിനെ ആയിരുന്നെങ്കിലും ഔദ്യോഗിക തിരക്കുകള്‍ കാരണം അദ്ദേഹത്തിന് എത്തി ചേരാന്‍ കഴിഞ്ഞില്ല. അതുകൊണ്ട് മലയാളത്തിലെ ഏറ്റവും തല മുതിര്‍ന്ന...
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മലയാളം വിക്കിപീഡിയയുടെ പത്താം വാർഷികം

നമസ്കാരം,
മലയാളം വിക്കിപീഡിയയുടെ പത്താം വാര്‍ഷികം ഈ വരുന്ന ഡിസംബര്‍ 21നാണ്. അന്നേ ദിവസം വിക്കിപീഡിയയ്ക് സമ്മാനമായി പരമാവധി തിരുത്തുകള്‍ കൊടുക്കാനാണ് തീരുമാനം. ഓഫ്‌‌ലൈന്‍ ആഘോഷങ്ങള്‍ ഡിസംബര്‍ 23ന് എറണാകുളം കലൂര്‍ റിന്യൂവല്‍ സെന്ററില്‍ വച്ച് നടക്കുന്നതായിരിക്കും. കാര്യപരിപാടികള്ക്ക് സന്ദര്ശിക്കുക - വിക്കിപീഡിയ പത്താം വാര്‍ഷികം. മിക്കവാറും ഞാനും പോകും. എന്റെ ആദ്യത്തെ വിക്കി പരിപാടി. നോക്കട്ടെ എങ്ങനെ ഉണ്ടെന്ന്.
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Mediawiki

Began my walk with MediaWiki.... Took a few beginning steps... Added an extension, Edited a sidebar, deleted a page (loved it), learned a little wiki markup.... Nice experience... Thanks Pirate Party...
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Pirate Party of India

Whoo!!! Joined Web Team and Media Team of Pirate Party of India... Installed an extension - Calendar...http://wiki.pirateparty.org.in/wiki/User:Balasankarc/Test ... Thanks Praveen chettan for granting the access...
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Pirate Party of India

Howdy All check this out... Its worth reading... Fight for a cause... For doubts mail at c [dot] balasankar [at] gmail [dot] com or join the mailing list given in the following website... Do you think the government isn't running the way we people thought they would?
Do you believe government are enforcing their stupid laws on us?
Do you think computer and internet should be made fundamental right to everyone?
Do...
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Programming Languages I intend to learn

Howdy all, This post will act as a remainder rather than a blog post. In my life, I wish to learn the following languages

  1. Python
  2. Java
  3. JavaScript
  4. A little of Ruby
  5. And of course improve my VB and VB.NET


Hope God will let me... :)
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Oracle not available : Shared memory realm doesnot exist

On opening sqlplus, I get the error: “Oracle not available”
“Shared memory realm does not exist” Solution done by me after searching Google:– 1.> In cmd type "sqlplus conn / as sysdba" without quotes 2.> startup nomount;
It shows the message ORACLE instance started. Total System Global Area (some value) bytes Fixed Size (some value) bytes Variable Size (some value) bytes Database Buffers (some value) bytes Redo Buffers (some value) bytes 3.>alter database mount; 4.> alter database open;...
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Diaspora Packaging

Howdy all, I forgot to tell you I'm temporarily out of Diaspora Packaging session till 5th November due to my exams... Hope to get there back soon....
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ILUG - Indian Libre User Group - Cochi

Howdy all, Let's see how many of you knew about ILUG? I came to know about it very recently. They are dedicated spreading Free Software awareness in society through its regular monthly meetings ( 4th Sunday of every month ),conducted since 1997. This month's meeting's details are as follows: 1. Introduction to Free Software We start of with our regular discussion on the concepts and philosophy of the Free Software Movement and related topics. 2. Agenda...
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Debian Packaging

Howdy all, Today also I'm continuing packaging session with j4v4m4n. There is a happy news that I finally uploaded my first package to mentors.debian.net. I've also requested Alioth for joining Ruby project. So, i thought why don't i summarize what all I know about packaging. It is as follows

  1. Make an ITP (Intent To Package) - Sample ITP can be found here
  2. Mail the itp to submit@bugs.debian.org. Note the following things
    (a) Use...
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ഗ്നോം മലയാളം പ്രാദേശികവത്ക്കരണം, ഐ ആർ സി മീറ്റിങ്ങ്

നമസ്കാരം, ഇന്ന് അടുത്ത IRC മീറ്റിങ്ങിലാണ്‍.. ഇത് ഗ്നോം ഇന്റര്ഫേസ് എങ്ങനെ മലയാളീകരിക്കും എന്നതിനെ പറ്റി പുതിയ SMC മെമ്പേഴ്സിന്‍  അവബോധം കൊടുക്കാന് വേണ്ടിയുള്ളതാണ്‍... അനീഷ് ആണ്‍ ക്ലാസ്സ് എടുക്കുന്നത്... നോക്കിയിട്ട് വരാം...
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Continuing packaging session...

Howdy all, The packaging session i mentioned earlier have just begun... We got aneesh and nadir today as session mate... Anyone interested can join the channel #debian-diaspora on irc.oftc.net... I corrected my control files and .changes files, Rebuilt the package and boom!
I uploaded my first package to mentors.debian.net and requested for uploading the same on alioth.debian.org... Now waiting for their confirmation mail...
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My first packaging session

Howdy all, Had my first packaging session (debian-diaspora) last night. The session was conducted by Mr. Praveen Arimbrathodiyil (j4v4m4n) and Mr. Vasudeva Kamath (copyninja). Learned the basics of Ruby Gem Packaging for debian packages...My fellow session mates were Mr. Ajinkya Bhosale and Xavier B...  The instructors helped us in various steps of packaging like

  1. Selecting an unpackaged gem
  2. Writing an ITP
  3. Reporting it to bug centrr
  4. Converting the gem to a .deb package

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Signing in...

Signing in... Boom.... BSC - Burning Sensation of Craziness.... My world, my word.... With Love BSC
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