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

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
...
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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)