Sarath Lakshman

Posts Tagged ‘Life’


Posted on March 20, 2009 - by

Updates

It has been a long time since I blogged, I am back again.

Life at college has been becoming so hectic with pathetic Assignments, Class tests routine. Moreover we are running out of time since this is a short semester. Waiting for the vacation to come sooner so that I can resume my contribution to some of the Open Source Projects I love.

Since last Novemeber 2008 I have been contributing Articles on Linux For You Magazine. You can download the articles that I have published over the recent months here.

Your comments and suggestions are expected :)


Posted on December 14, 2008 - by

Life, Update and Progress

I am entering another phase of academic circle and the same time going to hack on some more life instances. It was partly failure with life during my IIIrd semester since I was bad with health.

Now university semester exams are over and I am in the IVth semester. Around three large FOSS conferences : FOSS.IN, National Free Software Meet, International Freesoftware Conference has passed by and I couldn’t make my presence at any of there conferences due to various reasons. I really miss all those events. It is very glad to see that God’s own country is hosting numerous FOSS events.

I have been extremely busy at college being the part of organising team for Technopreneur and Excel 2k9.

Technopreneur 2009

Technopreneur is an annually conducted event hosted by Model Engineering College, Cochin. So many great personalities will be present at the event, delivering inspiring talks and interacting with attendees. It is a golden opportunity for everyone to interact  with CEOs and several other great personalities. Over the past version of Technopreneur several CEOs like Kris Gopalakrishnan of Infy, Suhas Gopinath of Globals, S. Parthasarathy of Mindree Consulting had present during the event. This time it is scheduled for Jan 31st and will be held at Gokulam Park Inn, Cochin.

The highlight speakers of Technopreneur 2009 includes Kiran Bedhi (first woman to get IPS in India), N. Ram ( Cheif Editor THE HINDU), Sarath Babu (The CEO of Foodking) and more. Wait for the techopreneur promotional blog post.

I am involved with Webdesign work  for the Technopreneur 2009. The website will be up in a couple of days and registration will be open. Check out http://www.technipreneurmec.org .

FOSSMEET @ MEC

The latest with Model Engineering College is about FOSSMEET which is almost scheduled to be conducted in accordance with Excel 2k9. MEC is a FOSS planet. Because we run our college completely on Free and Open Source Tools. We run our LABS completely on Debian and hosts web server, mail server, dns server on LAMP. Even though we have lots of potential geeks who work on GNU/Linux platform, we miss out community style of hacking. Our enthusiasts are scattered. We aim at organising all enthusiasts at MEC through this fossmeet so that more and more contributers will come out from MEC.

Since the one day fossmeet is going to be conducted for the first time, I have to hold certain burden of making the stuff work. I am seeking for sponsorship for the FOSSMEET. It would be worth for any Organisation / Company to sponsor the fossmeet at Model Engineering College, Cochin since we are running on FOSS for the past one decade. Moreover numerous students and delegates will be present at the Excel 2k9 so that it is a better place for advertising. So please do come forward, promote foss. Help us to make it happen.

happy hacking !


Posted on November 2, 2008 - by

The Bugfix day

Last sunday I had been to Navin’s house in agreement of certain deals. I go for outing very rarely and went to Hotel Abad Plaza for giving Navin and Navas a treat for completing gsoc2008. It took a couple of hours to arrive the ordered food and finally resulted in missing my train to home. They suggested me to stay at Navin’s house in Elamkkara and fix certain bugs. I had a couple of things to be done as a part of ending semester. I have my electronics lab record in pending and came up with a deal that I would try to fix those problems related to computers and Nawaz agreed to fill my graphs of electronics lab record.

Soon after we reached home, Navin and I de assembled his desktop box. His machine has been rebooting frequently due to overheating. I just re plugged the CPU and it started working fine. Voila. :)

Next we installed Kubuntu 8.10 for a try. KDE 4.1.2 looks really much better than earlier with 100s of bugfixes. I started loving dolphin, the filemanager for KDE 4. It has a cool feature, When pressed F4 a terminal slides up from the bottom. Also pwd for the terminal changes automatically when we navigate through different locations. Its cool !

Navin has been complaining for a long time that his nvidia graphics card hates his ethernet card. Whenever he install nvidia-glx proprietary driver, his Ethernet goes down. It was a real headache for him. So he used to install the nvidia driver with a third party tool called Envy. He tried envy-ng, the latest version with Kubuntu 8.10 and it failed returning some error. I confidently told him to install nvidia-glx. He installed it and soon after a reboot he was pulled into darkness.

I just found that loading nvidia module before the ethernet module makes it some conflict. I just blacklisted the nvidia module.

# echo blacklist nvidia >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
# echo modprobe nvidia >> /etc/rc2.d/K45nvidia

I manually loaded it via init script making sure after ethernet is loaded.

The problem got solved :)

I dont know exactly how ethernet module and nvidia module is loaded in present day distros. In earlier days I used find a module list. I assume that nowadays it is performed via UDEVD.

Here comes the second problem. Navin uses his Asianet Dataline for internet connection. Basically it is cable modem based one. Hence the connection is permanent to a MAC ID for Ethernet card. Nawas wanted to do an OpenSuse upgrade from his lappy with Navin’s internet connection.

I went for MAC ID spoofing and its done.

# ifconfig eth0

Find out the mac id for the ethernet card.
Found it to be 00:1C:23:FB:37:23

Now on the other machine.

# echo hw ether 00:1C:23:FB:37:23 >> /etc/network/interfaces
# /etc/init.d/network restart

Everything went fine. I had a 3 hour sleep and went to home via Ernakulam – Cannanore Express in the morning.
It feels like a bugfix day.


Posted on September 19, 2008 - by

I’m getting older :)

Today , my age = ++18 ;

I remember this is the age when Linus started writing Linux.

Your birthday is a special time to celebrate the gift of ‘you’ to the world.


Posted on July 18, 2008 - by

Having fun with new Cam

After several research on different brands of digital cameras, I finally ended up by choosing Canon SX 100 IS.

camera

Features:

  • 10x optical zoom lens with optical Image Stabilizer
  • 8.0 Megapixels
  • DIGIC III image processor
  • Face Detection Technology enhanced with new Face Select and Track function and dedicated Face Selector button
  • Canon’s total anti-blur solution with ISO 1600, Auto ISO Shift and optical Image Stabilizer
  • Improved Red-Eye Correction in playback
  • 2.5” LCD screen
  • 18 shooting modes including full manual control
  • Digital Tele-Converter and Safety Zoom*

I have ever been fascinated by good photographs. The quality and beauty of every photograph looks to be artistic. I came to know that my new camera comes with features like shutter speed adjustments, aperture adjustments etc. Have to learn about it in order to snap good pics.

I owned a Canon SX 100 IS :)