rtnpro

Secrets in a GitOps World: Scopes, an External Store, and Never a Value in Git

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0530

Overview

Last week I walked through the Argo CD and Kargo objects a golden-path layer generates, and closed on the thing that wasn’t there: not a single secret anywhere in those manifests. That wasn’t tidy example hygiene. It’s a design position, and this post defends it.

The tension is familiar. The GitOps pitch is everything in Git — desired state, reviewable, revertible, reconciled. The security pitch is never commit a secret. The most common resolution is to split the difference: encrypt the secret and commit the ciphertext, with Sealed Secrets or SOPS. It works, lots of good teams do it, and I think it’s the wrong default.

Why We Built on Argo CD and Kargo Instead of Reinventing CD

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0530

Overview

For three weeks I’ve ended every post with the same claim and never once shown my work.

The claim: the CNCF ecosystem already solved continuous delivery, and what the mid-market team is missing isn’t technology, it’s the assembly — a golden path stitched from primitives that already exist. Argo CD reconciles. Kargo promotes. The last post argued you should adopt that road as a product rather than build it as a project.

You Don't Need a Platform Team to Have a Platform (But You Do Need Golden Paths)

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0530

Overview

Two posts in, and both have been about a trap. Build an internal platform you can’t staff, or rent a hosted one you eventually outgrow. The most common reply I got was the fair one:

If the constraint is headcount, and I’m not getting headcount, what exactly am I supposed to do on Monday?

That question contains the mistake, and I made it too for years. It treats “platform” and “platform team” as the same noun. They aren’t. DORA’s 2025 research found adoption close to universal — “90% of organizations reporting the use of an internal developer platform and 76% establishing dedicated platform teams”. The interesting part isn’t the gap between those two numbers. It’s that neither one predicts whether the platform is any good.

We Priced Out 'Just Use a PaaS' at Scale. Here's Where It Breaks.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0530

Overview

Last week I argued that mid-market platform teams are stuck between two roads — build an internal platform you can’t staff, or rent a PaaS you outgrow. A few people pushed back on the second road: is renting really that bad? The DX is incredible and the bill is tiny.

They’re right, for a while. So this post is the honest version of the rent-it math. Not “PaaS is bad” — it isn’t — but where the curve bends, and why the bend catches teams by surprise.

The Missing Middle: Why Mid-Market Platform Teams Are Stuck Between Backstage and Vercel

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0530

Overview

There is a size of engineering organization that platform tooling has quietly failed.

If you are Google, you build your platform. You have twenty engineers who work on nothing but the platform, and the leverage is obvious: one paved road, used by a thousand developers, pays for itself many times over.

If you are four people with a Rails app and a deadline, you rent a platform. You push to a branch, a preview URL appears, and you have never once thought about an ingress controller. That is the correct trade.

Migrating a CNAME Record to Its Own Hosted Zone in AWS Route 53 with Zero Downtime

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 18:23:13 +0500

Overview

Migrating DNS records, especially CNAME records, between hosted zones in AWS Route 53 can be tricky and often introduces the risk of downtime. This blog post discusses the challenges of migrating a CNAME record from a parent hosted zone to its own hosted zone and provides a step-by-step guide to achieve zero downtime using a combination of AWS CLI and Terraform.

Example Use Case: We need to migrate the app.example.com CNAME record from the parent hosted zone example.com to a new hosted zone app.example.com. This migration must be performed without any downtime to ensure uninterrupted service.

Kubecon EU 2024

Sun, 05 May 2024 13:08:38 +0530

Introduction

I attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 at Paris, France. Thanks to Zapier for sponsoring me to attend this conference. It was a great week of learning and networking at KubeCon. I caught up with the latest trends in Platform Engineering, upstream projects and got a chance to connect with upstream contributors.

Highlights

Platform Engineering patterns

Apart from AI, one of the most popular tracks in KubeCon EU 2024 was Platform Engineering. Many companies and organizations shared their platform stories, pitfalls, and recommendations. Here are some key takeaways.

Contributing to ArgoCD ApplicationSet

Tue, 11 May 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Exploring ArgoCD ApplicationSet at Zapier and contributor experience

Speeding up Statefulset continuous deployments

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 10:16:16 +0000

This post explores the issue of blocked rolling updates during continuous deployment to Kubernetes Statefulsets due to failed volume attach attempts. It talks about workarounds and solutions for this issue, which results in consistent and faster STS rolling update times.

Enabling publish-service for ClusterIP nginx-ingress controller service

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:54:58 +0000

Currently, nginx-ingress controller can be run as a ClusterIP type service, however, it does not allow publishing this service’s endpoints to associated ingress objects. As a result, external-dns is not able to detect these ingress objects without any IP Address to create/update A DNS records for them.

Why?

Many may argue that why will someone need DNS records for ingress objects using ClusterIP type nginx-ingress service. They aren’t reachable from outside the kubernetes cluster, anyways.

Rootconf/Devconf 2017

Wed, 24 May 2017 06:45:39 +0000

This year’s Rootconf was special as it also hosted Devconf for the first time in India. The conference took place at MLR Convention Centre, JP Nagar, Bangalore on 11-12 May, 2017. The event had 2 parallel tracks running, 1 was for Rootconf and the other one for Devconf. Rootconf is a place like other Hasgeek events where you get to see friends and make new friends, learn about what they are up to and share your stints.

CentOS Community Container Pipeline

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 10:19:53 +0000

CentOS Community Container Pipeline empowers running a container registry (currently at https://registry.centos.org) to facilitate upstream and distro components to be delivered in a format suitable to be consumed by container tool chains on CentOS Linux.It enables upstream projects to build, test and deliver latest and safest container images, everytime and effortlessly (or with minimal efforts).

Problem statement

Containers are a great way to package and deliver applications and there are loads of container images around. However, few of them are authorized, trustworthy and well maintained. It’s easy for developers to release a container image, but not that easy to maintain it over a period of time, and to ensure that their container images always carry the latest fixes and updates.

Pycon Pune 2017

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 09:02:03 +0000

2017 saw a new chapter of Pycon in India, Pycon Pune. Pycon Pune 2017 felt more community focused, had loads of upstream contributors as speakers and participants, community booths (Pyladies, PSF) and loads of hacking.

Pycon Pune 2017 was a 4 day event, from 16 Feb - 19 Feb. The first 2 days were conference days, and the remainder 2 were for devsprints. This was my first year as a Pycon volunteer. I spent most of the time with Farhaan recording talks and running around with mic during QA sessions. Another great thing about this Pycon was that I had my wife, Sumukhi attend Pycon with me. Although, it was a totally new world for her, sometimes boring and dauting, yet, she had fun time volunteering in the conference.

Pycon India 2016

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 07:15:53 +0000

Day -1

Day 0: Devsprints

Day 1

Day 2

Failed to load SELinux policy. Freezing

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 07:11:52 +0000

In this post, I will tell you how to fix “Failed to load SELinux policy. Freezing” issue and reboot your Fedora with SELinux set to Enforcing.

It was the first day of Flock 2016, when I was working on my demos, that my laptop failed to boot after a bad system halt. The error was:

systemd[1]: Failed to load SELinux policy. Freezing.

I was running Fedora 23 on my laptop with SELinux set to enforcing. After searching about this issue on the internet, I found that most people had got around it by setting selinux=0 in the boot parameters. Well, it worked and got me back on my Fedora without SELinux, however, this was not the solution I was looking for.

Basic video editing with ffmpeg

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 18:04:40 +0000

The following is my cheat sheet for basic video editing with ffmpeg

split

When I want to split a video input.mkv from 10s to 30s and save it as output.mkv:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -ss 10 -t 30 -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mkv

concatenate

Let’s say, I want to join (concatenate) 2 video (or audio) files: part1.mkv, part2.mkv into a single file: joined.mkv. I will first create a file: input.txt with the following content:

Flock 2016

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:35:11 +0000

This year, Flock took place in Krakow, Poland from Aug 2 - Aug 5, 2016. I reached at Krakow on July 31, 2016.

Day 0

Next day, we met other attendees who started coming down from various places. In the afternoon, we went out for a city tour, visited Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, had lunch and returned back to the hotel. In the evening, we headed out to a nearby mall to have dinner with fellow attendees.

A typical day from my life

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 11:39:39 +0000

Today, I will be speaking about a typical, healthy and active day from my life. This is about a lifestyle I was able to attain and sustain, discovered during the course of my journey to become fit and stronger.

Some time ago, I was leading a very undisciplined life, working day and night, eating whatever’s palatable, and I was getting fatter and fatter, reached up to 83 Kgs. Around 2 years back, I started my journey to become fit and get back into shape. I started working out at the gym, experimenting with my diet: eating less, eating more, eating right stuff. After going through hell lot of pain, I came to a point where I was able to see the results: reducing weight and waist line, feeling fit and strong, when I became self motivated to work out daily and follow proper diet and sleeping pattern. I reached a weight of 65 Kgs some months back and I have been maintaining it since then. The best part about it is the feeling of being active and fit throughout the day.

Migrated blog to run inside a container

Sat, 18 Jun 2016 16:05:00 +0000

Today, I migrated my Ghost blog to a Docker container running on CentOS 7. The config and content data for the blog has been pushed to https://github.com/rtnpro/rtnpro.com.

The setup was pretty simple.

git clone https://github.com/rtnpro/rtnpro.com
cd rtnpro.com
# Allow sharing this directory with a Docker container
sudo chcon -Rt svirt_sandbox_file_t ./
# Allow nginx access port 2368 expose from Docker container
sudo semanage port -a -t http_port_t -p tcp 2368
# Run container
sudo docker run -d -ti -p 2368:2368 \
--name rtnpro_com_ghost \
-v $(pwd):/var/lib/ghost \
-v $(pwd)/themes:/usr/src/ghost/content/themes \
-e NODE_ENV=production \
ptimof/ghost
cp nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/www.rtnpro.com.conf
sudo service nginx restart

And, tada! I have my blog running inside a container now.

Storing IRC logs for Fedora Hubs

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 08:52:25 +0000

We have started working to power realtime IRC chat on Fedora Hubs pages, using Waartaa. We plan to load the Waartaa chat widget as an <iframe> inside Fedora Hubs.

The user story we are looking forward to create is as follows.

A user logs in to Fedora Hubs using his FAS account. He then creates a network connection to IRC and connects to the IRC server. Under the hood, it will run an ircb bot for the user’s IRC connection in waartaa. The user can now chat on IRC from Fedora Hubs pages, or, from an IRC client of his choice, simultaneously, using the same IRC nick.

Getting started with atomicapp

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 11:01:55 +0000

atomicapp is a reference implementation of the Nulecule Specification. It can be used to bootstrap container applications and to install and run them. atomicapp is designed to be run in a container context. Examples using this tool may be found in the Nulecule library.

If you want to know the internals of atomicapp, how it works, etc., or contribute to it’s development, this post is for you.

Setup

Install python virtualenv utils

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments. virtualenv creates a folder which contains all the necessary executables to use the packages that a Python project would need. virtualenvwrapper is a set of extensions to easily create, manage and destroy virtualenvs. I personally prefer using virtualenvwrapper for my Python developement work.

ircb 0.1.1 released!

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 08:29:42 +0000

Today, ircb gets 0.1.1 release. It’s a minor release with some bugfixes post 0.1 release:

Fix handling nick AWAY command
Fixes around SSL options in networks create CLI.
- make –ssl option of flag type
- make –ssl-verify option of Choice type

We’re now gearing up for our upcoming 0.2 release. Don’t forget to check it out, if you want to be part of the action.

ircb 0.1 released!

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 09:45:37 +0000

ircb gets it’s initial 0.1 release!

ircb is a versatile IRC Bouncer, made for scale. It was born out of our sheer requirements for a better IRC bouncer when hosting the demo instance of waartaa. A bouncer that:

scales to multiple hosts, to overcome connection limitations put by IRC servers on a single host
accepts multiple simultaneous client connections for the same IRC connection
A sane API to control it
has awesome dashboard and analytics, built in

We plan to ship ircb as a standalone, consumable product. It’s eventually going to be used in waartaa as it’s core engine to handle IRC connections.

Atomicapp 0.3.0 released!

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 07:19:07 +0000

Atomicapp gets 0.3.0 release!

A major highlight of this release is the new provider: Marathon. Apart from this, numerous other features and bug fixes and changes went into this release:

A complete refactor of our OpenShift provider (API comm rather than oc command)
Support for oc new-app deployment
Refactor on CLI commands and options
Optios such as –answers-conf can now be used anywhere on the command line

As always, any contributions are highly appreciated. Feel free to look at https://github.com/projectatomic/atomicapp/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md for an introduction into contributing to Atomicapp!

Started learning to play guitar

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 07:22:29 +0000

I was thinking to learn playing guitar for some time now. I tried self learning from the internet, but I was not regular and so my skills with guitar always remainded next to zero. Seems like I am not that self motivated for it, as I am in the case of coding and working out. Well, neither was I motivated to work out until I joined the gym and took personal training. That provided the external push to get started initially, and when I started to see the results, I became self motivated for working out.

A month at OSAS, Redhat

Sat, 07 Nov 2015 15:17:48 +0000

This had been lying in the draft for quite some time now, waiting to be published. Better late, than never.

Well, I joined the container tools team in OSAS, Redhat on August 24, 2015. Nevertheless, I had already been contributing to the upstream projects around projectatomic prior to joining Redhat :). It was not a totally new environment at Redhat, I knew many people from the Fedora community at Redhat and in our team. It’s like working amongst friends.

Nuleculize your Docker application

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 07:42:26 +0000

It’s easier to explain things with an example. So, I will take up centos/postgresql docker image and nuleculize it for Docker and Kubernetes as providers. This post assumes that you have setup an Atomic environment on CentOS7/Fedora. If you have not done so, you can follow the instructions here.

First, we’ll create scaffolding for our Nulecule PostgreSQL application.

mkdir -p nulecule-postgresql/artifacts/{docker,kubernetes}
touch nulecule-postgresql/{Dockerfile,LICENSE,Nulecule,README.md}
touch nulecule-postgresql/docker/postgresql-app-pod_run
touch nulecule-postgresql/kubernetes/{postgresql-pod,postgresql-service}.yaml

Second, we’ll edit nulecule-postgresql/Nulecule file as below:

Setting up Atomic on CentOS 7

Sat, 29 Aug 2015 10:10:29 +0000

This post will run you through how to setup an environment Atomic apps on CentOS 7, by hand. For quickstart, you can just run the Vagrantfile at here.

Setup

Install dependencies

# yum install docker atomic kubernetes etcd

Configure docker storage pool

Assuming that you have a new volume: /dev/vdb attached to your machine, configure /etc/sysconfig/docker-storage-setup as below:

# cat <<EOF > /etc/sysconfig/docker-storage-setup
DEVS=/dev/vdb
VG=docker-vg
EOF

Start and enable Docker

# systemctl start docker
# systemctl enable docker

You can run # docker info to check the new specs for docker storage pool.

Fedora 22 Release Party, Bangalore

Sun, 23 Aug 2015 18:32:06 +0000

We had a Fedora 22 release party in Bangalore, on Aug 1, 2015. It took place a Hackerearth’s office in Bangalore. We had around 9 attendees for the party along with the hosts from Hackerearth.

The event started at around 10:30 AM and continued till 1:30 PM. We started with us introducing ourselves. Following the introductions, Sayan giving a brief introduction about the Fedora Project and it’s history. This was followed by me speaking on Fedora 22 release and it’s highlights.

FUDCON Pune, 2015

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 07:33:47 +0000

After 4 years, after 2011, FUDCon came back to Pune, again in 2015. It took place from 26th to 28th June, 2015 at MIT, Pune. Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) is the annual conference for people interested in Fedora in any way. This year’s FUDCon had a great line up of talks and multiple parallel tracks: Container, Openstack, Storage. I took part in FUDCon this year as a speaker and a volunteer. It was an amazing experience to work late nights carrying swags, processing event videos, and chatting with fellow Fedora folks.

Fedora meetup, Bangalore, June 2015

Tue, 09 Jun 2015 17:07:19 +0000

We again met at Starbucks Coffee, Indiranagar on June 6, 2015 at 5:30 PM for our monthly Fedora meetup in Bangalore.

Attendees:

Topics discussed:

Openstack setup and overview
Vagrant on Fedora, it’s quirks and how we can make it more awesome
Statscache demo
How to start contributing to Fedora infra

This meetup was one of the most fruitful Fedora meetups in Bangalore. We had folks from different communities (Project Atomic, Openstack) to add more value to the meetup. I hope that we can maintain the same or better streak of awesomeness. Also, we are considering to move to a quieter place for the next meetup. Stay tuned for updates on Fedora India mailing list .

Rootconf 2015

Thu, 04 Jun 2015 19:08:56 +0000

Last month, May 15-16, there was Rootconf in Bangalore. Rootconf is a premier conference for devops and system administrators. The highlights of this Rootconf were SaltStack, RancherOS, Project Atomic, PostgreSQL, etc. We also had Fedora presence in the conference. 3 Fedora ambassadors: Aditya Patawari, Praveen Kumar and myself were present at the event. We distributed Fedora 21 workstation DVDs at the registration desk and announced about FUDCON Pune, 2015 as well.

Fedora meetup, Bangalore, May 2015

Sat, 09 May 2015 04:35:04 +0000

We again met at Starbucks Coffee, Indiranagar on May 2, 2015 at 6 PM for our monthly Fedora meetup in Bangalore. Like the meetup in the month of April, there were only 2 attendees: myself and Sayan Chowdhury. Well, we are used to such things and were not disheartened.

As decided over the mailing list, we discussed on the hot topics from in the Fedora Cloud ecosystem:

We also explored docker-swarm, consul and discussed on how to build autoscaling cluster with these. Following this, we started working on our tasks in Fedora Infra. There’s little discuss and much to code :)

Started working at Idea Device

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 14:30:20 +0000

This month, i.e., April, 2015, I started working for Idea Device Technologies as a Member of Technical Staff. I will be mostly working on backend stuffs here and help build scalable tools for infrastructure automation. Idea Device is mostly a Python shop using Pyramid, gevent, etc. to the fullest apart from other awesome technologies. However, its not just the tech stack that got me attracted towards Idea Device, the folks that make Idea Device as well.

Meeting reminders in fedocal

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 17:43:09 +0000

fedocal 0.13 release makes it possible for anyone to download iCal file for a meeting and brings support for client side notifications.

You can do this in the following ways:

Click on a meeting in fedocal
In the meeting modal/page, click on the iCal export link to download iCal file for that particular meeting.
You can also export iCal file for the meeting with reminder info in by checking the reminder checkbox beside the iCal export link, and then clicking on the iCal export link.

Once you have downloaded the iCal file for the meeting, you can import the iCal file using Evolution in Gnome 3.

Fedora meetup, Bangalore, March 2015

Sat, 14 Mar 2015 05:32:05 +0000

We resumed our monthly meetups in Bangalore on the March 7, 2015. We’ve now decided to hold Fedora meetup in Bangalore on the 1st Saturday of every month. Here’s link to our event on Fedora Calendar: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/meeting/2036/.

We met at Starbucks Coffee, Indiranagar. at 6 PM. It was good place to chat and had free wifi internet too. We were 4 people. We discussed on:

upcoming Fedora 22 release
contributing to testing Fedora 22 images
contributing to Fedora Infra

We were also having some discussions on #fedora-apps on Freenode during the meetup regarding various tasks we’re handling and brainstorming on new ideas. The folks in the meetup also found Kushal Das’s worknotes very handy to get started with testing of Fedora cloud images. The discussions were not just limited to Fedora. We also shared the cool things we have been working on at our workplaces, new technologies: reactjs, meteorjs, polymer, golang, etc.

Moving to Ghost

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 12:55:36 +0000

Migrated blog from nikola static site generator to ghost.

Fedora 21 release party, Bangalore

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 06:30:00 +0000

Last Saturday, on Jan 10, 2015, we had a Fedora 21 release party in Bangalore. It was held in the premises of Red Hat, Bangalore with the help and support of Archit and Humble, who are working at Red Hat, Bangalore.

Registration for the event started from around 9:30 AM and slowly people started dropping in. Over 40 people had turned up for the event. We started the event at around 10:30 AM with Archit giving an introduction about Fedora.

Fedora meetup, Bangalore

Sun, 02 Nov 2014 06:30:00 +0000

Today, we had a Fedora meetup in Bangalore, at HackerEarth’s office. Although, there were only 4 attendees including ourselves: myself, Sayan, Ashwin and Puneet, we made the most out of the meetup. The meetup lasted from morning 11 AM to around 3 PM. Following is a summary of our activities during the meetup:

Discussed about the upcoming Fedora 21 release
Planning for a release party for Fedora 21 in Bangalore
Ashwin shared his knowledge on embedded systems
Puneet knows C++, so, we asked Puneet to start working with KDE and Qt
A few bugfixes in fedora-infra: pkgdb2 and FMN
Planning for a Fedora and open source orientation event in Ashwin’s college

It was great to meet with like minded folks interested in technology and Open Source and hack with them. We are looking forward to have similar meetups every month. We envision these Fedora meetups to be a place where people can join and share knowledge, and hack on cool Open Source projects.

Waartaa stats

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 06:30:00 +0000

try.waartaa.com has been live since January, 2014. We have got quite some signups and some folks actively using Waartaa. Thanks to our code level optimizations, which has led to storage complexity for channel chat logs dependent only number of unique channels being listened to. We’re also able to achieve good real time performace in our demo instance with ever growing chat logs. It’s time to publish some stats about our demo instance.

Flock 2014

Fri, 15 Aug 2014 06:30:00 +0000

It was great that our proposal to speak on Waartaa at Flock, 2014 was accepted. So, I, along with Sayan went to Prague, Czech Republic last week to attend Flock. Flock was a 4 day event packed with loads of talk and workshops. It was like living in a dream at Flock. I was able to meet so many great people from the Fedora and Open Source community.

Day 1

Say hello to Waartaa

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 06:30:00 +0000

Waartaa is an Open Source communication and collaboration tool build on top of IRC

Mozilla Summit 2013

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 06:30:00 +0000

I have been contributing to Mozilla for some time now and so, I got the opportunity to attend Mozilla Summit 2013 at Santa Clara. Contributors from all around the globe turned up to attend the Summit which was going in parallel in 3 places: Santa Clara, Brussels and Toronto.

Finally, I met Mathjazz at the Summit. We had been working for a long time on Pontoon and were communicating over the internet. Not only did I meet Mathjazz, but his Mozilla team from Slovenia. We had some discussions on Pontoon and it’s roadmap. I attended the i18n and l10n discussions led by Axel from Mozilla and got more insight into the process. I had some discussion with Axel on plans to integrate l20n with Django and Python in general. It did not seem that straight forward. Axel asked me to get in touch with @jezdez on this.

Time flies by

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 06:30:00 +0000

Well, it’s been quite some time since I last blogged. There have been a lot of things happening at my end and amidst this I totally dropped the ball on updating my posts. As it is said, it’s better late than never. Let me summarize what happened over the past couple of months.

Good bye Transifex, hello Goibibo

I quit #Transifex last January (2013) and joined Goibibo. Goibibo is one of the products of Ibibo Web Pvt. Ltd., an e-commerce giant in India. No doubt Goibibo is doing an awesome job in the market, one of the main reasons for me joining Goibibo was that it is a #Python shop and #Django is what that drives it. Needless to mention that we Python lovers always favour Python and love to stick to it :D. So far, it’s been an #awesome #roller-coaster ride at Goibibo, especially, in terms of the scaling it handles. Things are totally different when your product serves so many users and especially when you are dealing with monetary transactions. The things I learned at #Transifex helped me to push some best practices like TDD, coding standards (Flake8), etc. in Goibibo’s work culture. I also replaced #gitweb + #reviewboard with #Gitlab as our VCS. Gitlab has helped a lot to streamline the process of pushing code. People now work on #branches for each feature/fix. The #branch gets tested by #QC and the #developers first. If everything is OK, the branch gets merged to master and pushed for a release. Currently, I am planning to implement #DXR codesearch and #IRC for communication.

#Django #TransactionTestCase with REUSE_DB=1 of #django-nose

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 16:33:18 +0000

Lately, I found out that Django’s TransactionTestCase leaves test data in database after the test case is executed. It’s not until the next execution of _pre_setup method of a TransactionTestCase instance that the database is flushed. This is troublesome when tests are run with Django Nose’s test runner with REUSE_DB =1.

An easy fix to this is to customize the TransactionTestCase so that it deletes the test data on exit. I wrote a simple wrapper around Django’s TransactionTestCase and extend it to write other transaction test cases.

My talk got selected for #Pycon India 2012

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 14:09:20 +0000

My proposed talk titled Develop for an international audience got selected for Pycon India, 2012. It’s time to start working on the slides. I am thinking to use rst to write my slides. Also, I have booked by flight tickets for Pycon

Thanks everyone who voted for my talk.

Validate Python string translation in Transifex

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 07:29:55 +0000

Transifex already supported validating translations of old styled Python strings, e.g.,

[sourcecode language=”python”]
“A sample string with a %(keyword)s argument.” % {‘keyword’: ‘key word’}
[/sourcecode]

The validation is done by checking if all the positional and keyword arguments are present in the translation string and the translation string does not contain any extra argument which is not in the source string. You can have a look at the validator code here.

A year at Transifex

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 06:25:43 +0000

It’s more than a year now that I have been working at Transifex. It’s a great experience to be a part of the Transifex team. Well, it’s been a roller coaster ride for me at Transifex. I had to go through steep learning curves, work with new stuffs, deliver great features, meet strict deadlines. It was fun, because of being part of an awesome team. I am very much thankful to Apostolis, Konstantinos, John and Diego for guiding me and helping me.

App specific logging in Transifex

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 05:49:21 +0000

Yesterday, I was working on adding app specific loggers in Transifex. By app specific logger I mean a logger which shows the app name which generated the log. As of now, the logs in Transifex look something like this:

[sourcecode language=”python”]

2012-06-29 13:01:43,300 tx DEBUG Saved: Project Avant Window Navigator
2012-06-29 13:01:43,312 tx DEBUG Saved: Project Switchdesk
2012-06-29 13:01:43,324 tx DEBUG Saved: Project Usermode
2012-06-29 13:01:43,342 tx DEBUG Saved: Project desktop-effects
2012-06-29 13:01:43,349 tx DEBUG Saved: Project im-chooser
2012-06-29 13:01:43,355 tx DEBUG Saved: Project Test Project
2012-06-29 13:01:43,364 tx DEBUG Saved: Project Test Private Project
2012-06-29 13:01:45,704 tx DEBUG Saved: Project Test Project
2012-06-29 13:01:45,717 tx DEBUG Saved: Project Test Private Project
2012-06-29 13:01:45,731 tx DEBUG Resource Resource1: New ResourcePriority created.
[/sourcecode]

FUDCON KL Day 3

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 14:10:53 +0000

The 3rd day of FUDCON KL started a bit sluggishly for me. May be because of brainstorming and hacking till late night. We (Kushal, Soumya and me) decided to work on a new app to display system logs in a user friendly manner. We named the application Tower log tower, in short, tlogt, after Twin towers of Kuala Lumpur

During the first few hours of the day, we went to visit some tourist spots in Kuala Lumpur: Aquaria and Petronas towers. After we returned, we settled down for the on going talks. Amidst of various talks on the 3rd day of FUDCON, I was sometimes in listening mode, but for most time I was in coding mode. We decided to try something different in TlogT. The UI would be rendered by a Django daemon with all the WOW factor of HTML, CSS and JS. I was to code the Django server code, while Kushal and Soumya were working on writing the parsers for extracting the logs for various processes. In a few hours, we had a decent Django based functional desktop app ready. Although, quite some work remains to be done on the UI part.

FUDCON KL 2012 Day 2

Sun, 27 May 2012 04:36:37 +0000

Day 2 of FUDCON KL started with a talk on Fedora book by Joshua Wulf (for me Sitapati Prabhu). This idea is very intuitive for any one (especially newbies) to start contributing to Fedora documentation. Although, contributors need to know some basics of docbook, I guess that’s not tough.

There were many interesting talks for the day on topics like Ask Fedora, Transifex, Fedora Tour, etc. Soumay‘s talk on Fedora in Education was really inspiring. He shared how he initially started as a contributor and many things about DGPLUG‘s Bijra project. Following this talk, there was another talk by Soumya on Ask Fedora. This one explained to the attendees what is Ask Fedora, why was it needed and how it can be used. Soumya also explained to the attendees that Ask Fedora runs on Askbot (an Open Source QA forum) and encouraged people to contribute to Askbot.

FUDCon KL 2012 Day 1

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:14:01 +0000

I arrived at Hotel Sri Petaling at around 3 AM on May 18, 2012. After very less sleep, I woke up at 6:30 AM. After having our breakfast at the hotel, we left for UCTI (the venue for FUDCON KL) in a bus arranged by the FUDCON KL organizers. After reaching the venue, we got ourselves registered at the registration booth for FUDCON and we received our coupons for lunch and tea. It didn’t take long for the other attendees to arrive at the venue.

Create a dummy Fedora repository (for Dorrie)

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:48:28 +0000

I have been fiddling with Dorrie lately. Dorrie is a web interface to create Fedora spins, remixes and installation media. But working with Dorrie requires one to have a Fedora repository at disposal if one has to build Live ISOs. I rule the possibility of downloading packages from the internet for testing. You need to have a local repository for testing it in a nice and efficient way. I tried to create a dummy Fedora repository with 0-byte .rpm files and tried to mock livecd-creator, but I failed. I forgot that livecd-creator installs the packages during the process of creating a Live ISO. Nevertheless, this attempt was not without any result. I fixed and updated Dorrie’s code to handle offline repositories.

Updating all your fedora package git directories

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:10:04 +0000

Ouch! My Bad

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:07:08 +0000

Dear Turkish translators

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 06:23:09 +0000

Transifex usually defines plural rules for languages according to http://unicode.org/repos/cldr-tmp/trunk/diff/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html. So, the plural rule for Turkish language in Transifex is other → everything. However, lately there has been some requests that the Turkish language should have two plural forms:

nplurals=2; plural=(n>1)

The requests have been with reference to http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms.

Here is a quote from a user at https://bitbucket.org/indifex/transifex/issue/26/turkish-plural-forms:

Turkish behaves like Akan for example. The rule should be:

One: 0, 1 Other: 2-999

rtnpro @ Mukti 2012

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:09:31 +0000

Mukti is the annual FOSS festival organised by the GNU/Linux Users Group of NIT Durgapur. Mukti 2012 was held on 3-5th February 2012. I have attended every Mukti in NIT Durgapur from 2008 to 2011 as a student and this time (in 2012) as a speaker. My talk was on Localization and Transifex. NITDGPLUG, as always, put a lot of effort in making Mukti a grand FOSS event in the region. It was a packed with a plethora of events and had a large number of participants. Mukti serves as a great means to get together people interested in FOSS in the Eastern and North Eastern part of India. It helps newbies get more insight into FOSS.

#Transifex now supports comments in Apple .strings i18n files

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:18:37 +0000

#Transifex now supports comments in Apple .strings i18n files. Only /* foo */ style comment in the line preceding the key value pair in the source file is saved as a comment for the key. The example below will explain this in a better way:

[sourcecode]
/Comment for key1/
“key1” = “value 1”;

/* This comment will not be
included in key2*/

/* comment for
key2*/
“key2” = “value 2”;

NVIDIA issues fixed on Fedora 16

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:43:33 +0000

This week, I upgraded from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16 on my Dell XPS M1530 laptop. This laptop has a 256 MB NVIDIA 8600M GT graphics card. The default driver for NVIDIA cards that came with the installation was nouveau. Nouveau is an open source driver for NVIDIA graphics cards and is under development. Things are becoming better and better with nouveau.

I ran gnome-shell for some time with the nouveau driver. 3d rendering worked nicely and without any latency. I did not find any other issue except for some overheating issues. So, I decided to switch to the NVIDIA’s proprietary driver.

Me & FUDCON India 2011

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:44:14 +0000

I arrived in Pune for FUDCON on November 2, 2011. On November 3, 2011, I had an opportunity to visit the Red Hat office in the city and hang around with Fedora community members. I learnt more about the mechanism and importance of localization from Runa Bhattacharjee. In my free time, I also helped with some FUDCON related work. I was able to meet Jared Smith, Joerg Simon and Robert Scheck for the first time in my life, talk with them. I couldn’t ask for anything better.

Start testing Transifex

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:43:27 +0000

How do you setup Transifex?

Here is all you need to know to setup Transifex: http://help.transifex.net/server/install.html

http://fosswithme.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/setup-transifex-in-virtualenv/ is another good write-up on how to setup and run Transifex in virtualenv. So, I’d be building on top of that to show you how to start testing Transifex using django-nose.

What packages will you need?

django-nose, nose, nose-exclude, coverage

You can install the above packages using

pip install <package_name>

Configure Transifex settings to enable django-nose Test Runner

Regex pattern for c style comments

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:47:27 +0000

Today, I am going to discuss my attempts to parse c style comments.

For example,

//This is a comment 

** /***This is also *** a comment ***/ **

Initially, I came up with a regex for /…/ style comments :
/*.**/
Well, the above expression was not able to parse comments like:

<br></br>
/*** This is a comment ***/<br></br>```
I googled and came across [http://ostermiller.org/findcomment.html](http://ostermiller.org/findcomment.html) where I found the regex:
`<strong>/*(.|[rn])*?*/</strong>`
This was able to match comments like the above one. But it’d also match the following /*…*/ comments which are not really comments:

s = “This is a string: /* with a comment /”;

//comment1 /

foo();

//comment2 */

```

Add plug-n-play functionality to your Django project using Django-addons

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:17:34 +0000

What is Django-addons?

A Django app used to add true plug-n-play functionality to your own Django applications and projects. Django-addons is brought to you by Indifex, the company behind Transifex.

Django-addons is a bunch of code that makes writing addon/plugins for your Django project much easier. Add django-addons to your Django project and you can drop all the addons to ‘/addons’ directory.

How to install Django-addons?

You can install the latest version of django-addons running
pip install django-addons
or
easy_install django-addons

Transifex implements related tag cloud

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:13:22 +0000

Lately, I have been working on a bunch of exciting new stuffs for Transifex. I have worked on a tag-cloud implementation which not only shows the popular tags, but also shows tags related to a tag selected by the user. It is pretty useful. It directs the user to select more relevant tags. The tag cloud is refreshed each time the user makes a selection to show the related tags.

Blogging from HTC Sensation

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:08:00 +0000

I just installed WordPress for Android in my HTC Sensation. This is a test post from my phone.

Posted from WordPress for Android

A brief introduction to coverage.py

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:07:25 +0000

Coverage.py is a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs. It monitors your program, noting which parts of the code have been executed, then analyzes the source to identify code that could have been executed but was not.

Coverage measurement is typically used to gauge the effectiveness of tests. It can show which parts of your code are being exercised by tests, and which are not.

Getting started:

Install coverage:

pip install coverage
easy_install coverage

Use coverage to run your program and gather data:

$ coverage run my_program.py arg1 arg2 blah blah ..your program’s output.. blah blah

Quick start Django development server with HTTPS

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:56:32 +0000

Here is a good tutorial to start Django development server with HTTPS using stunnel.

http://mgile.com/post/4729505823/django-stunnel

More fine tuned auto save feature in Lotte for Transifex

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:00:04 +0000

Lotte is the component of Transifex providing the web UI for the translators to translate online. Well, some time back, I made some changes in the Lotte code so that it has the auto-save feature on by default. It was running fine then and I was happy. Then I added the spellcheck feature in Lotte. Then the things started going not as expected.

Actually, the auto-save triggers when the contents of a text area has been edited and it loses focus. The first problem I faced is that the spellcheck button did not respond on the first click, but on the second. As expected, on the first click, auto-save was triggered. But this was not the case when I clicked the Undo button. First the auto-save and then the undo function would be executed. I was not able to come up with an answer to explain this. I was tinkering with the code and then accidentally I solved the problem. I just changed the order of the buttons. Initially I had – Spellcheck button , Save Button and Undo Button. Now, I have – Save button, Spellcheck button, Undo button. Weird! You can have a look at the change at https://bitbucket.org/rtnpro/transifex/changeset/b59880cadf67 . If you have an explanation for this, please comment.

Testing coverage of your Django code

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:31:01 +0000

Just writing tests for your Django codebase is not enough. You need to check how much of the code is covered in your tests. For this, there are some tools available. Again, it is not just the number of lines of code tested that matters. What matters is “Are these lines important?”. Well, for this, we have to use our head.

covergae is a tool for checking test coverage of python applications. django-test-coverage was built on top of coverage.py to meet requirements of django tests.

Fixing unittests for transifex

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 10:26:35 +0000

Last week, I have been working on fixing the existing unittests for Transifex. The Transifex codebase is constantly being updated. So, some of the previous test cases failed. Before this, I had already written a unittest or two for some of the codes that I contributed to Transifex. But I did not study the Django unittest framework deeply for that.

This time, it was different. I took my time to go through the Django documentation on testing. And then I started to work on fixing the existing tests. To avoid confusion, I ran test on each component separately. Only a few were containing errors like projects, lotte, release, resources, projects, txcommon, suggestions, charts, etc.

It feels good to blog again

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:27:26 +0000

Well, it has been quite some time since my last blog. The last days of my college, yes, they were very hectic. I had to complete my college project. Well, I had to handle a couple of preventions and seminars, mostly by myself ( although in a group). I finally implemented scatternet formation and routing and built a relay chat kind of thing on top of that. I named it Bluetooth Relay Chat. It worked quite, except for the interface not being that WOW. One can send public messages and private messages as well. I am maintaining the code as a private project in bitbucket. I will release the code soon.

Learnt to use SSH tunnel - Thanks to BSNL 3G, it won't let me login to trac.transifex.org

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 08:05:03 +0000

For some days, I was not able to login to trac.transifex.org. I though that it might be a browser issue. So, I deleted the browser data and tried to login using firefox, opera and google-chrome, but I still couldn’t login.

Then, I established an ssh tunnel from my computer to a remote server and set up proxy settings in my browser to use the ssh tunnel. And now, I can login correctly. This shows that it is not a browser issue but a connection issue.
I think something is terribly wrong with BSNL 3G servers and their maintainers.

These days are hectic

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 02:38:40 +0000

For some days, I have been working like anything for my final semester project in college, because I have to. I have also some tasks to do for transifex. When will the college be over?
But I have to find some time, anyhow.

sufferring from hepatitis :-(, have to go home

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 07:35:47 +0000

From last week, I have not been feeling good. I was getting tired very quickly, even from a small walk. And now I have taken to bed. I am now eating only boiled food. I will be leaving for home as soon as possible. I will get quick recovery under mother’s care.

Mailing and notifications working in my local Transifex

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 03:06:05 +0000

Thanks to fim, the mailing and notification system is finally working in my local transifex setup. Now I can go forward with writing another patch.

RPM for tweepy got approved :)

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:43:33 +0000

Pavel Zhukov approved my review request for tweepy-1.7.1. I’ll submit an SCM request now.

Review request at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=675104

Contributing to transifex

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:05:32 +0000

For some time, I have been hanging around with django. I got some cool video tutorials on the web on django. They helped me a lot to start coding in django. At the same time, I was also going through the Transifex source code. After some time, I browsed through the tickets in trac.transifex.org and started with fixing ticket #679.

I had to go through javascript, jquery, html in addition to write the patch for #679. I also wrote a custom pagination plugin for dataTables pagination for fixing the issue mentioned in ticket #679. I submitted the patch upstream for review. I hope it will be accepted.

Testing python-wordpress-xmlrpc

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:43:36 +0000

Success!

Testing python-wordpress-xmlrpc

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:42:57 +0000

Trying to use python-wordpress-xmlrpc

Reported a bug report for koji

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:01:59 +0000

It’s greatly annoying that I am not able to do koji scratch builds or fedpkg builds. I had discussion with nirik at #fedora-admin. He asked me to show him the outputs of a couple of commands. I updated to koji 1.6. Still, the problem is persistent. I guess, it is not actually a bug, otherwise others would have surely reported. I think it is some small configuration issue that is being overlooked.

Quite some time ... since I wrote last

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 05:27:15 +0000

A lot has happened since I last blogged. I’m now not going to recollect my memories :P. Any ways, if I were to summarise, I was busy with college seminars, project reports, semester exams, etc. What a drag!

After the exams ended, I felt like a free bird ready to fly high. I started studying Django. I am also revising python.

Yesterday, I packaged python-keyring-0.5.1 for F14. It fixes some bugs in keyring v 0.5. But, I am not able to do a koji build from my system. It says “AuthError: Invalid session or bad credentials”. I did run fedora-packager-setup. I am able to login to koji using the web interface. But I am not able to build using koji cli. I am trying to resolve this issue.

Installed scribe beta in my Nokia C5

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 04:29:39 +0000

I was tired of searching for a mobile blog app. Alas! WordPress blogging app is not for Nokia C5.
Finally, I came across scribe, a blog app for s60 platforms. It’s written in Python.
This is my first blog using Scribe.

Updated Wordgroupz-1.xo

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 06:01:49 +0000

Gary designed the new icon for wordgroupz activity for sugar. Uploaded the bundle at

http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/wordgroupz/Wordgroupz-1.xo

today.

Can anyone suggest a nice activity name for wordgroupz for the Sugar Desktop Environment?

coding for lekhonee-gnome

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Lately, I have been studying the code of lekhonee-gnome. It is written in vala. I wrote a patch for it to allow saving of drafts locally after every 30 seconds. I submitted it to the upstream, kushal for approval.

Now, I am testing another patch of mine for lekhonee-gnome. Previously, whenever one used to press “Publish” button, the written post is cleared from the editor. Once, due to network problems, the post was not published, and with it my post was also cleared from the editor. I don’t think that’s a desireable feature. Even, wordpress editor does not clear the post after publishing it.

Test successful ![:)](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)

coding for lekhonee-gnome

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 04:58:02 +0000

worgroupz version 0.3.1 released

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:36:27 +0000

Nothing new in the version 0.3.1 though. I removed the dependency on the python-nltk library. Extracted the requisite code from the python-nltk library to access only the wordnet dictionary. Also, there has been some clean ups.

Future plans:

I am thnking to get rid of the dependency on the wordnet package as it brings in some other unnecessary dependency like Tcl. I am thinking of providing the wordnet dictionary as a default plugin. It will be installed if wordnet dictionary is not already installed. Also, I am planning to incorporate a dictionary view, and some kind of dashboard to wordgroupz.

Purchased Nokia C5 - great value for money

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 03:01:42 +0000

Last week was bad. My Nokia 5310’s keypad stopped working, then my BSNL 3G data card broke. I could hardly be online the last week. Yesterday, I purchased Nokia C5 and it seems to be a good investment. I had to pay Rs 7,620 only for it. Compared to the price, the features are great. You can see the features of this phone from http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_c5-3122.php.

It has got a 600 MHz ARM 11 processor, 128 MB RAM, USB charging. In that respects, it seems better than N79. It has got 3G and supports speed upto 10.2 Mbps. The 3.2 MP camera is good enough with a decent flash. Sound is also good. It runs S60 3rd Edition OS.

wordgroupz version 0.3 released

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:23:38 +0000

It is pleasure to inform that wordgroupz has now stepped into version 0.3

It has been quite some time since I have been working on wordgroupz v 0.3b. In this period wordgroupz went through a lot of changes. To sum up, the features in wordgroupz v 0.3 are :

You can add words into different groups. In other words, you can classify different obscure words under a common group name which is easy for you to remember.

wordgroupz development news

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:58:06 +0000

Lately, I worked on fine tuning the code for wordgroupz. I fixed some bugs that I was aware of, like unable to parse data retrieved from wiktionary pages which did not have any ‘Contents’ field, error launching games when no words in db, some bugs in webster view, etc. Now, I have added a dialog which will show a message saying ‘Not enough data’ if the number of words in the db are not enough for playing games. I have also added support for parsing data from wiktionary pages which have no ‘Contents’ field. Also made some fixes in the webster view.

wordGroupz development News

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:43:04 +0000

Although, I had added the accuracy for the words in wordGroupz in the treeview, it was not satisfactory. First, the app crashed whenever I added a new word to the database. I fixed that easily. But then, the new word would show its accuracy as 0% even before attempting to answer it. I decided to set the CellRendererProgress bar text to ‘New’ for new/not attempted words.

I got some help for IRC Nick: Juhaz at #pygtk in GimpNet. I came to know that set different properties of a cell for a particular column in a gtk.TreeView, I have to set a function in gtk.TreeViewColumn.set_cell_data_func(). I got further help from the documentation at Develp in Fedora.

wordGroupz development news

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:17:58 +0000

wordGroupz is now slowly moving to the version 0.3 release. I launched the v0.3 b quite some time back. Since then, I have worked on many new features, adding features, deprecating old features and many random changes. In this time, wordgroupz underwent a considerable upgrade in its GUI. Based on the outcome of the games, I decided to store the accuracy of the user for each word and show a bar chart for that. But that did not look good. So, I dropped it. I, instead, showed the accuracy % alongside the words in the wordgroupz tree view with the help of gtk.CellRendererProgressBar.

wordgroupz development news

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:52:37 +0000

Finally got time to write this post.

I’ve been a lot busy lately. Had to do some changes in wordgroupz.

I was working on the output display format for wordgroupz, i.e, how to show the definitions stored in the wordgroupz database. I created a policy that whenever a word is added, wordgroupz will fetch its definition from the default “Wordnet” dictionary. Then one has the option to search for more of the word’s details on wiktionary from within wordgroupz. Once the wiktionary page is viewed online, the wiktionary data is saved in the database.

I have implemented a tabbed design for viewing the details of the word: one for wordnet and the other for wiktionary, till now. I have to expand it for webster as well. A few extra lines of code will do that. The rest remains the same.

Below are the screenshots of the new tabbed view:

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/wordnet_view.png)

Wordnet output

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/wik_view.png)

Wiktionary Output View

Then, I started working on the games frontend. I took inspiration from kwordquiz. I put the flash card and the multiple-choice-question in a tabbed view. I am also recording the number of correct responses given along with the attempts made on a particular word in both the games : flash-card and MCQ. This will help the user to identify the words that are difficult to remember for him. Thus, he can pay more attention on those words. Below are the screenshots for the games module.

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/flash_card.png)

Flash-Card

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/mcq.png)

MCQ

Have to improve the GUI for games. The functional code is almost done. Now, remains beautification.

I request readers of this blog to give their kind suggestions to make the UI better.

To test the games module, you can do :

$git clone git://gitorious.org/wordgroupz/wordgroupz.git

$cd wordgroupz

$python wordgroupz.py

Note: Now you can add some words to wordgroupz

Note: run the games module

$python games.py

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Resuming work on wordgroupz

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:28:39 +0000

For some days, I have not been able to work on wordgroupz. I was sufferring from fever. Apart from that, I came back to Durgapur yesterday. I am, kind of, well now.

Now, I started working on the saving the various details from wiktionary. Still having some problems regarding customizing wiktionary view. Some trivial issues like :

* webkit.WebView.load_string(), the backward_forward list doesn’t work nicely. Rather, if you jump to a new link, you cannot come back to the original load_string page.

* opening and editing html with beautifulsoup disables the javascripts.

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working on flash-card module for wordgroupz

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:01:31 +0000

Now, I am working on making the flash-card module for wordgroupz. I plan to collect the responses( incorrect/ correct) for the words. This will come to use for performance stats generation. Below are the screenshots of the flash-card module.

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/Screenshot-games.py.png)

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/Screenshot-games.py-1.png)

Suggestions are welcome ![:)](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)

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wordgroupz development news

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:15:54 +0000

For some time now, I have been working on wordgroupz. Since version 0.2, I have added some new features.

The new features include dictionary support: online webster dictionary from dict.org and offline wordnet. For implementing the online dictionary support, I used the server interface of dict.org. For offline, I used the dictionary databases of the wordnet application and the python-nltk library.

I also included wiktionary support this time. I used to find it tedious opening a notebook, browser to search wikipedia/wiktionary, copy-paste notes. That’s why I decided to get them all together under one hood – wordgroupz. I include a gtkNotebook : 1st page for showing, editing details of the selected word and the 2nd page for browsing through wiktionary and downloading pronunciations if available. I had to study urllib2, BeautifulStone, pywebkitgtk for the purpose.

wordgroupz v 0.3 beta released!

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:29:44 +0000

Today I released wordgroupz v 0.3b.

New Features -

1. Dictionary support – online dict.org webster, offline wordnet

2. Wiktionary support – lookup details of the word on wiktionary, download pronunciations if available

3. New interface

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/Screenshot-wordGroupz-2.png)

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/images/Screenshot-wordGroupz-3.png)

Dependencies for wordgroupz:

1) gtk, pygtk2

2) python-nltk

3) wordnet

4) pywebkitgtk

5) BeautifulSoup

To install wordgroupz for fedora:

1) download [http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/rtnpro.repo](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/rtnpro.repo) into /etc/yum.repos.d/

2) as root do: yum install wordgroupz

To install wordgroupz on any other linux OS:

1) download [http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/wordgroupz/wordgroupz-0.3b.tar.gz](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/wordgroupz/wordgroupz-0.3b.tar.gz)

2) Untar it: $tar xvf wordgroupz-0.3b.tar.gz

3) Change directory to wordgroupz-0.3b: $cd wordgroupz-0.3b

4) As root, install from setup.py:

$su

#python setup.py install

Feel free to report any bugs, new feature request or suggestions.

wordgroupz development news

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:43:38 +0000

Lately, I have been working on adding new features to wordgroupz like dictionary support, wiktionary support, pronunciation support. I have also made some changes to the wordgroupz gui optimized for the new features.

**wordgroupz** v 0.2 screenshot:

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/Screenshot-wordGroupz.png)

![](http://home/rtnpro/Pictures/Screenshot-wordGroupz.png)

The dictionary support features online dict.org webster dictionary and a offline wordnet dictionary. I used the server interface to retrieve definitions from it.

I used the nltk library to retrieve definitions from wordnet dicitionary database.

I implemented the wiktionary support using webkit, BeautifulSoup and urllib2. Pronunciations if availale on wiktionary are allowed to be downloaded.

The new interface looks like this below:

![](http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/Screenshot-wordGroupz-1.png)

Due to the frequent changes made in the **wordgroupz** repository at [http://gitorious.org/**wordgroupz**/**wordgroupz**/trees/master](http://gitorious.org/wordgroupz/wordgroupz/trees/master), I have not been able to update the setup.py, README, etc. files. I also added a nltk*tar.gz in the src folder, that looks weird. I will be cleaning up the repository.

For the time being, to test the code, follow the following steps:

1) download the src code

2) do not install it via setup.py

3) extract the nltk*.tar.gz and install the nltk python module from the setup.py inside nltk.

4) install pywebkitgtk

5) Now run the new interface using wordgroupz_new.py

All the previous features have not been ported to the wordgroupz_new.py, which I wrote while coding for the wiktionary support. I will updating the file soon.

Please give your valuable feedback for improvements.

The post is brought to you by [lekhonee-gnome](http://fedorahosted.org/lekhonee) v0.9

// //

FAD Pune 2010

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:46:08 +0000

It was a great experience at the FAD in Red Hat, Pune. The FAD was conducted for two days, 29th and 30th May, 2010.

Day 01

Siddhesh took a session on autotools. The session was informative and interactive. I came to know how the big Makefile and Configure files are automatically generated from makefile.am and configure.ac (Makefile.in is first generated though, then the Makefile). Siddhesh used the linkc program for the purpose.

Update xnoise.spec

Sat, 01 May 2010 02:51:27 +0000

I got a nice and long review for my first package of xnoise :). You can read the review at

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=586433

I made the suggested changes –

4c4
< Summary: A media player for gtk+
—

Summary: A media player for GTK+
6c6
< License: GPLv2
—
License: GPLv2+
12c12,14
< Source0: xnoise-0.1.2.tar.gz
—
# make dist
#to generate xnoise-0.1.2.tar.bz2
Source0: xnoise-%{version}.tar.bz2
15,16c17,20
< BuildArch: i686
< BuildRequires: vala, vala-devel, intltool, libtool, autogen, automake >= 1.11, gnome-common, gtk2-devel, sqlite-devel, taglib-devel, unique-devel, gstreamer-devel, gstreamer-plugins-base-devel, gettext, desktop-file-utils
—
#BuildArch: noarch
BuildRequires: intltool, libtool, autogen, automake >= 1.11
BuildRequires: gnome-common, gtk2-devel, sqlite-devel, taglib-devel
BuildRequires: unique-devel, gstreamer-devel, gstreamer-plugins-base-devel, gettext, desktop-file-utils
18c22
< Requires: gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-base, gtk2, gettext
—
#Requires: gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-base, gtk2
21,32c25,27
< Xnoise is a media player for gtk+
< Xnoise is written in vala
< Xnoise can play every kind of audio/video data that gstreamer can handle
<
< #%package devel
< #Summary: Development files for %{name}
< #Group: Development/Libraries
< #License: GPLv2
< #Requires: %{name} = %{version}-%{release}
< #Requires: pkgconfig
< #%description devel
< #Development packages for Xnoise
—
Xnoise is a media player written in vala for GTK+.
Xnoise can play every kind of audio/video data that gstreamer can handle.
Xnoise uses a tracklist centric design and uses a hierarchical tree structure media browser along with plugin interface. Xnoise is always running in a single instance,so that music files that are associated with it, will always be added to the tracklist instead of starting a new instance.
67,70c62
< %{_libdir}/pkgconfig/xnoise-1.0.pc
< #%files devel
< #%{_libdir}/pkgconfig/xnoise-1.0.pc
< #%{_libdir}/xnoise
—
%exclude %{_libdir}/pkgconfig/xnoise-1.0.pc
74,75c66,69
< * Tue Apr 27 2010 rtnpro rtnpro@gmail.com 0.1.2
< – RPM package xnoise
—

RPM Packaging xnoise for fedora

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:59:49 +0000

This is the first time I am packaging a software.
I chose xnoise. I have been using xnoise (compiled
from the source repository) for sometime and I like it.

What is Xnoise?

Xnoise can play every kind of audio/video data that gstreamer
can handle. Xnoise uses a tracklist centric design and uses
a hierarchical tree structure media browser. It also has a
plugin interface. Xnoise is always running in a single instance,
so that music files that are associated with it, will always be
added to the tracklist instead of starting a new instance.

Wrote a patch for kettu, web interface for transmssion

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:56:12 +0000

Kettu is the new web interface for transmission bit torrent client. It is written using javascript and jquery. I wrote a small patch for kettu to filter the torrents on the basis of activity. Here activity means if the torrent is either uploading or downloading, i.e, upload_speed + download_speed > 0 KBps.

Here’ s the patch I wrote :

diff –git a/index.html b/index.html
index 2a8ff97..b54b6b4 100644
— a/index.html
+++ b/index.html
@@ -58,6 +58,7 @@
Sort -

<a href=”#/torrents?filter=all”>All
+ <a href=”#/torrents?filter=active”>Activity
<a href=”#/torrents?filter=downloading”>Downloading
<a href=”#/torrents?filter=seeding”>Seeding
<a href=”#/torrents?filter=paused”>Paused
@@ -94,4 +95,4 @@

An introduction to Linux Device Drivers - #1

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:49:39 +0000

Today we’ll be discussing a basic c code, the famous hello.c, which will be loaded as a kernel module and discuss some of the basic aspects related to it.

#include <linux/init.h>

#include <linux/module.h>

MODULE_LICENSE (“GPL”); // included in module.h, tells about the license the code is having.

static int __init hello_init (void)

{

printk (KERN_ALERT “Hello, worldn”);

return 0;

}

static void __exit hello_exit (void)

{

printk (KERN_ALERT “Goodbyen”);

}

module_init (hello_init); // hello_init is the initialization function

An introduction to Linux Device Drivers - #0

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:21:05 +0000

I’ll be honest, I am neither a kernel hacker nor a device driver writer, but I want to be one. I am studying the Linux Device Drivers 3, the LDD 3. It is an effort from my end to document what I have understood from reading the LDD 3. There might be some errors or misinterpretation on my part and I will be glad if anyone corrects me. I will be trying to keep the things as correct as possible.

rtnpro @ Ganga Sagar Mela, 2010

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:36:02 +0000

We ( me, Bama and Subhrodeep) left for Ganga Sagar Mela from ISKCON, Mayapur along with ISKCON devotees on the Monday morning of Jan 11, 2010. We had lots of fun in the bus. Fisrt, our bus was special. It was the bus in which there was the Gour Nitai deity. We started the journey with Narsimha Arati and we prayed for a safe journey. Then we chanted the holy names and the devotees from outside India started melodious kirtans.

Installed Fedora 12 on Dell XPS M1530 :)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:53:52 +0000

Yesterday, I finally completed downloading the Fedora 12 i686 DVD iso. I then tried to install Fedora 12 from iso, as I did when I installed Fedora 11 from its ISO image. But this time, when it came to customizing the packages, it was asking for a network connection to get the softwares from the online repositories ( when no Install Disc was inserted) and when I kept the F11 DVD inserted in my laptop, it took the package list from the F11 DVD. Didn’t expect that.

Fedora 11 offline mirror setup at BCREC

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:34:58 +0000

Saturday, 31 October, 2009 I set up an offline Fedora 11 mirror in BCREC. I used the fedx makefile for the purpose of syncing the repository from my pocket HDD to the mirror PC ( an HP dual core system with Fedora 10 installed in it). I then setup a dhcpd server in the machine with the help of gdhcpd. I wrote a how to use the service and put it on the Desktop. I also wrote a fedora-local.repo which could be used by the clients to configure their machines to use the service. This should enable newbies without internet connection to get packages and softwares of Fedora 11.

IMPS Workshop 12 - 14 October, 2009

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:41:02 +0000

11th October, 2009, I, Kishan and Meejanur started our journey to Malda for the workshop at IMPS College. We boarded the Gour Express from Burdhaman Junction at 00:30 Hrs 12-10-2009. Kushal and Harsh boarded the same train from Sealdah. We reached Malda Town at around 6 AM in the morning. We got together in the station and had some chit-chat amongst ourselves. Kushal was taken to a hotel for his stay and we were taken to the college hostel by the college vehicle ( Maruti Omni).

A long night ... fedX + get rpmfusion repo

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:56:02 +0000

I became desperate yesterday night to do some useful things, anything. Had a long offline Puja Holidays. I was struggling to understand “How to write Makefiles”, and yesterday it clicked and I ended up writing a Makefile for the ongoing fedX project. Though the makefile which I wrote is not that great, but I have a start now. Committed the changes to the fedX repository at

http://gitorious.org/~rtnpro/fedx/rtnpros-fedx-clone/

It was around 4:00 AM in the morning already. Made some changes in my gitorious project clones. Apart from that, I was trying to download the rpmfusion repositories for Fedora 11. I was using rsync on multiple screens for the purpose. But again and again, rsync used to stop downloading after working for sometime. Then I tried a Firefox addon “DownThemAll” and was very happy to see it work. All I needed was to browse the repository page listing all the packages, right click and select DownThemAll. And then I just needed to select where I want to save the downloaded files and start it. It downloads multiple files simultaneously and does not halt when one of the files cannot be downloaded, rather it pauses it and moves to others. It also supports resume, and has an option to skip the already downloaded files.

Software Freedom Day 2009, Kolkata

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 07:07:42 +0000

On 15th September, 2009 the Software Freedom Day was celebrated in

The CSI Auditorium,

Computer Society of India, Kolkata Chapter,

5, Elgin Road, 4th Floor,

Kolkata – 700020

The following talks and discussions were planned for the SFD 2009, Kolkata :

A. Mani to speak on “The Fedora Project”

J. P. Mathews to speak on “Using Linux on PCs with limited resources”

Ratnadeep Debnath(me) to speak on “Fedora-12 Highlights”

Snehashish Chakraborty to speak on “RabbitMQ”

Puja Holidays in Guwahtai

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:05:16 +0000

Happy Durga Puja to all.

It has been a long run since I left for Durgapur after the Software Freedom Day,2009 at Kolkata. I reached Howrah station at around 8:15 PM on 15th September 2009. Though I got an e-ticket for Durgapur in the Danapur Express which was about to leave from Howrah at 9:35 PM, I still didn’t have a hard copy. I thought I could get a print out at the station from the .html file of the e-ticket I was having in my mobile phone. As ill luck would have it, the one cyber cafe that was there in Howrah station was being demolished (might be for repairs … drastic). I had plenty of time though, so I went outside the station to try my luck. With some help from the folks out there, I started my venture to find a place to print my ticket. Couldn’t find any in the proximity. Finally I found one, but the shop’s printer ran out of ink. What the hell! It was 9:15 PM and so I returned and boarded the train. My mobile phone was almost out of charge, and so I transferred the only document of my ticket to my laptop. When the TTE came, I showed him the html file and after some arguments, I was able to convince him. It could have been worse. I didn’t have my Identity Card with me.

Finally, completed writing FedX wizard :D

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:30:00 +0000

[![wizard_intro](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/fedx_w1-150x150.png)](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/2009/09/05/finally-completed-writing-fedx-wizard-d/fedx_w1/)

wizard_intro

[![select source & destination](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/fedx_w2-150x150.png)](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/2009/09/05/finally-completed-writing-fedx-wizard-d/fedx_w2/)

select source & destination

[![fedX wizard final page](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/fedx_w3-150x150.png)](http://127.0.0.1:8080/wordpress/2009/09/05/finally-completed-writing-fedx-wizard-d/fedx_w3/)

fedX wizard final page

Today, on 5th September, 2009, I completed writing the fedX wizard. I didn’t write it from scratch, though. I found the grsync source code, and the GtkAssistant tutorial in [http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/articles/Technical/New_GTK_Widgets_GtkAssistant](http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/articles/Technical/New_GTK_Widgets_GtkAssistant) very useful and informative for a newbie like me. I used parts of code from the above mentioned sources. I pushed the wizard.c file today in my gitorious clone of fedX at

http://gitorious.org/~rtnpro/fedx/rtnpros-clone

Silence...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:22:05 +0000

It has been a long silence from me since I came back from Kolkata on 10th August 2009. In Kolkata, I and some of my friends were doing internship under Indranil Das Gupta. Back here in Durgapur, having already missed near a month’s regular college classes, we didn’t receive a nice response from our college authorities. I had a lot of pending college assignments and other stuffs to attend to. I had some really boring long days. This month, I shifted to a new mess in Sarat Pally, St, No. 2, Fuljhore with Harsh and Bama. Although we applied for a BSNL broadband connection in our mess, till date, no response from BSNL. Hope to listen from BSNL this week at least.

Fedora Offline Repo Setup now known as FedX

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:20:02 +0000

This summer I am working on building a GUI for easy setup of a completely offline Fedora repository as a part of my DGPLUG summer training 2009. This, if successfully implemented, will greatly help us to spread Fedora and FOSS usage in areas where decent internet connections are not available in general.

I am being mentored by** mbuf** in this project. He gave a COOL name to this project

FedX

A very very long day @ Barasat University

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:08:51 +0000

On 14 July, 2009, me ( Ratnadeep Debnath aka rtnpro) and Meejanur Rahaman ( aka meejan) and Kishan Goyal were heading towards Barasat University. Kishan took a bus from Howrah at around 8:30 AM and we started from Ruby Hospital at around 9:30 AM to Barasat. We hoped that we’ll be reaching the university at most by 11:30 AM and will have enough time to work. Our bust took a turn from Daak Bunglow. We told the conductor that we need to go to KaziPara, so the conductor said that he’ll drop us a bit ahead. We got down, enquired about the university, and no one seemed to have heard of it. Then we enquired about KaziPara, and then took a van. Then we were amidst a big traffic congestion. We were taking to Taki Road KaziPara, where we came to know that we came off the path to the university and came to now from the folks that there was another KaziPara at Jasha Road. We took a van again to Jasha Road. When we got down there, we found that this was not also the place we wanted to go. We enquired about the university from the folks out there, they were all dumb about that.

First visit to West Bengal State University, Barasat ...

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:50:52 +0000

Today, 13th July, 2009, we ( me , i.e., Ratnadeep Debnath aka rtnpro, Kishan Goyal, Meejanur Rahaman, Harsh Verma, Chandana Boral) led by Indranil Das Gupta and Stephanie Das Gupta, went to West Bengal State University at Barasat, Kolkata. We started at around 10:30 AM from Ruby Hospital, and after a long journey ( changing two buses, then riding on a van, with a few drizzles on the way), we finally reached Barasat University at around 12:30 PM.

Resolved ATI issue in Fedora

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:24:02 +0000

System Specifications :

hp compaq 6515b,business series

processor-AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology
tl-50,clk rate 1600 mhz
hardisk -80gb
ram -1.5gb
Video
Video card features ATI Radeon X1250
Video Memory Shared video memory (UMA)
Max Allocated RAM Size 512.0 MB

Issues :

Problem with the Graphical User Interface. System used to hang a lot. Moving and clicking with the mouse was a pain. Even there was a latency to browse the application menu. Firefox won’t run nicely. System usage was normal. System ran fine in CLI.

Install Windows Games in Linux with PlayOnLinux ...

Fri, 22 May 2009 13:09:36 +0000

Hi all… I have a Dell XPS M1530 running on Fedora 10. It has got a 2 GHz Intel Centrino Duo processor, 2GB RAM, 256 MB Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT, quite a configuration for decent gaming. But till today I had to boot in Windows Vista to play games. So I have been trying to install and run Windows games in Fedora. There are a few tools for this purpose. The famous and proprietory and non-free Transgaming Cedega, Codeweavers Crossover Games and the all free PlayOnLinux. All these use wine which is a free software for running Windows applications in Linux. Though paid, Cedega and Crossover Games don’t support as many applications as PlayOnLinux. And when you are not sure that whether your games are going to run or not in Linux, wine and PlayOnLinux is the free and good option to stick to.

Day 2, DGPLUG Fedora Activity Day, 2009 ...

Sat, 16 May 2009 14:13:21 +0000

15th May, 2009, Day 2, DGPLUG FAD in Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur.

It was around 11:30 AM, that we started the 2nd Day of FAD. The number of participants were less than the Day 1, it was around 15, but we could see some new faces. The ECE students couldn’t join because they had their internals and Lab Examinations the very same day. We started the day with some cool videos from tv.dgplug.org on Okular, KSnapshot, Packagekit, etc.

DGPLUG Fedora Activity Day ... Day 1, 14 May 2009

Thu, 14 May 2009 14:19:18 +0000

The Linux Users’ Group of Durgapur, i.e, DGPLUG conducted a Fedora Activity Day in Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur. Though it was planned to be a 1 day FAD, it got extended to one more day, i.e, 15th May 2009. The people working for this FAD to happen are Harsh Verma, Kishan Goyal, me , i.e, Ratnadeep Debnath (rtnpro), Subhodip Biswas, Arindam Ghosh, Meejanur Rahaman, Dibyanshu Jaiswal. Also, we had Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury with us. And also Arpita, Amrita, Debashree were there to talk on Inkscape. There was also with us Sunny Sharma, another FOSS enthusiast.

How to make a custom Fedora Linux Distribution

Sat, 09 May 2009 14:32:17 +0000

The following is a nice tutorial on how to create a custom Linux Distribution .

PCPlus has a tutorial on building your own Linux distribution with the customizations you want, derived from Fedora, using the graphical interface called Revisor. “We’re used to thinking of Linux distributions being set in stone. They’re either KDE or Gnome, use a certain kernel and bundle certain applications. But this doesn’t have to be the case. If you find yourself making the same adjustments each time you install a new distribution, it’s worth creating your own customised version. Revisor is a tool that lets you do just this, and in this tutorial, we’ll show you how.”

Working with some bluetooth coding :)

Fri, 08 May 2009 18:19:05 +0000

It’s been quite some time since I started poking with bluetooth coding, but didn’t understand it much. But it was quite some moment this afternoon. I was trying to study the rfcomm source code, and finally could able to find out the part of the code responsible for the “bind” option for rfcomm. Had a code already for scanning for nearby bluetooth devices. Edited some of theirs codes, added some lines, and came up with a code in c which scans for nearby bluetooth devices, displays them, asks the users to choose one of the devices to bind, and accordingly binds that device. But for that, the device must be already paired up with the host computer. Here’s the code:

DGPLUG Fedora Activity Day, 2009

Wed, 06 May 2009 17:58:10 +0000

A Fedora Activity Day is going to be conducted by the Linux Users’ Group of Durgapur, DGPLUG in Dr. B. C. Roy Engneering College, Durgapur on 14 May, 2009.

The agenda of this FAD is to increase FOSS awareness among the students of BCREC and to introduce them to the wide spectrum of things that they can do in Linux in their day to day life.

Fedora is not just an operating system, it is a community comprised of people coming from different walks of life, yet all believing in the foundations of Fedora

How to create an ssh key?

Tue, 05 May 2009 18:06:49 +0000

I’m not going to talk on the theory of ssh key encryption and all, but how to create one.

OpenSSH is needed to be installed in the system to create an ssh key. Generally, OpenSSH comes with Fedora. But, anyways you can do:

$ yum install openssh

to install it.

Once it is installed, do the following :

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

You will be prompted to enter the location to store the ssh key files, press Enter for default. The default location is

How to setup a GPRS internet connection in Linux via bluetooth ...

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:58:29 +0000

Often I hear questions like this “How do I connect to the internet from linux via my bluetooth mobile phone GPRS?”

Yes, there are ways to do that, but telling a newbie to go to the terminal and do hcitool scan, rfcomm, etc. spooks him out. And also The system-config-network, while setting up a Modem Connection through it, one has to com across port numbers, baud rate, etc. and a user not used to Linux, most of the time finds these things weird, especially the users. These issues need to be looked into and some actions are required to come up with a more user friendly interface in this regard. That’s another topic of discussion though …

Fiasco trying to upgrade fs from ext3 to ext4

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:44:22 +0000

It was afternoon when I tried my hands on trying to upgrade my filesysten from ext3 to ext4. I referred to :

http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Converting_an_ext3_filesystem_to_ext4

As mentioned… I did the following :

<code style="white-space:nowrap;color:#495988;background-color:white;"># tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

<code style="white-space:nowrap;color:#495988;background-color:white;"># e2fsck -fD /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

After quite some time, the procedure finally completed. I was so delighted that I did a sytem reboot to find that my system won’t boot. The reason, I didn’t update my kernel ramdisk image, and it tried to mount the / partition as ext3 and failed as the partition has already become ext4. What I forgot to do was :

Really inspiring!!!

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:29:39 +0000

Everyone makes mistakes…
It’s nothing to be ashamed of
Don’t let this mistake go to waste
Be able to smile as you walk

Yes, I breathe in the quiet air,
And raise my face toward the sky and jump in
If it rains, I’ll take a break
And let the wind decide where I go
I carry along many regrets
But letting these wounds go to waste is stupid
Carve a medal into your chest and set sail
Your life becomes a “showtime” from there

rtnpro starts his blueZ journey...

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:15:18 +0000

Just now … I wrote my first ever blueZ code, a simple one though, that too, from an online tutorial at

http://people.csail.mit.edu/albert/bluez-intro/c404.html

Its a nice tutorial for newbies like me to get started with blueZ.

First of all, I needed to setup my blueZ development environment. Since I use Fedora 10, I did the following

yum install -y bluez-libs bluez-libs-devel libgdbus libgdbus-devel

Also, one can manually install it from the source packages available at

Resolved Kernel boot problem :D

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:36:45 +0000

I am using Fedora 10 and I was running the kernel 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686 and I was happy until I did a ‘yum update’. My kernel got updated to kernel 2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686, and then the system won’t boot the latest kernel. While booting it gave a mesage :

Unable to access resume device (/dev/dm-1)

mount : could not find filesystem ‘/dev/root’

I wondered what had happened? But, the old kernel 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686 seemed to work perfectly. I became fanatic to resolve this issue. I did some googling, and finally came to know that the issue was with /etc/fstab and my Fedora 10 being installed on LVM. Here is my previous fstab details :

Bijra Project Updates

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:31:12 +0000

It has been quite some time I blogged on our ongoing classes. And how are we doing? So far it’s been quite some good experience taking classes in Bijra High School. Hope to make it better and better.

Lately, classes were taken in Bijra High School on 4/3/2009 and on 6/3/2009.

Let me remember…mmm…what did we do out there on 4th March…I remember now :

We were lucky to get the 11:20 B-Zone bus to Kataberia. People who went to Bijra? Ratnadeep (rtnpro), Kishan, Bappi, Meejanur, Harsh ( with his digikam). We reached the school by 12:00 PM. We called the Std. VIII students in groups in the Computer Lab. Bappi and Kishan took charge of the lab. Basically, it was kind of a recapitulation or better introductory class for the Std. VIII students. They were introduced to the OpenOffice Writer and later they had some hands-on with TuxPaint. I and Meejanur went to Std. V to take theory. O Gash! It was some different Std. V than the last time we saw it, full of din and bustle. We started the speak on the topic CPU and its components. Don’t know what happened, was it that we could not communicate the topic nicely or they were in a mood of fun, the class could not continue. We talked on this matter to their teachers and asked for their cooperation to make the students more disciplined. Then it was the half day break. After that, there was the computer lab for the students of Std. VI and I and Bappi went to Std. VII. The students were serious. The class was responsive and inquisitive. I remember them even asking :

What an install Fest in Kalyani Govt. Engg. College! :O

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:00:07 +0000

It was on 21 February 2009, that there was a Fedora Activity Day and an Install Fest in Kalyani Govt. Engg. College, Kalyani. It was one of its kind with students craving to register for it. The seminar hall was packed. This was a rare scene. But it indicated that the young students at KGEC are really fired up to bring a change. The seminar started at 11:30 AM. There were around 140 students in the seminar hall. The anchor was Snigdha Deb Mukherjee ( a 2nd year CSE student in KGEC). Then followed the speech delivered by the College Professors. And after that, it was Indranil Das Gupta to address the people out there in the hall. As always, his was an inspiring speech in which he explained how he started using Linux, what was the scenario back then, how the FOSS comunity in India started to come into being and the present scenario of FOSS in India. He also mentioned about people like Sayamindu Das Gupta, Gopal V, Subhodip Biswas, Arindam Ghosh and about their contributions to FOSS. Everyone was thrilled and inspired by his words. Then Indranil Das Gupta left for Kolkata.

Finally...VirtualBox installed in F10....

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:25:12 +0000

After some googling, I finally got some How-To install VirtualBox in Fedora 10. The problems that I was facing with VirtualBox is that I was unable to compile the kernel module of VirtualBox successfully. Following are the steps for setting up VirtualBox in a 32-bit Fedora 10 system.

Steps:

1) Open the terminal and go to the super user mode :

su -

2)Download the latest VirtualBox package for Fedora 9/10 from

Finally I installed Fedora 10 in my Dell XPS M1530

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 10:27:44 +0000

Yesterday, on 2nd January, 2009, I finally installed Fedora in my Dell XPS M1530. The installation went fine and it was great to see a new glossy installation screen. After the installation, Plimouth is also working fine, but I had to add a kernel option for that—

vga=0x318

The graphics was ok , but not perfect without the Nvidia drivers. Then I set rpmfusion.org enabled on my system and downloaded the Nvidia drivers from there.

I stumbled across a few new stuffs today...

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:53:50 +0000

To find the PCI ID of a particular device use the lspci command. depending on the version and usage of the lspci command various output is shown. In Fedora, I use the following to identify the PCI ID (Note: the grep is added to filter the output):

$ /sbin/lspci -nn | grep ‘VGA|NV’ 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] [10de:0322] (rev a1)

Use the PCI ID and look it up under Appendix A. Supported NVIDIA GPU Products in any

I wrote a shell script...

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:14:24 +0000

We were facing a lot of difficulties in setting up Fedora after the installation. Reason? Poor internet connection in the locality. It was a great dissatisfaction for me and Kishan (my friend) and also for the newbies. To resolve this, Arindam Ghosh gave me a copy of “Fedora-mirror” and taught me the How-Tos to setup an offline Fedora-mirror and do the requisite installations. It was really a needed gift for us. We set-up many a system successsfully with its help.

Fedora 10 issues with X Server

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:27:36 +0000

Exams ended, and today in the morning I was heading as fast as I can towards my Mess to get my hands on the Fedora 10 DVD. Also I had to fix some issues regarding another Fedora 10 installation in my friend’s notebook, which is a Compaq Presario with Nvidia graphics card.

The thing that I found there was that his X-server was not running. I tried to peek into the xorg.conf but in vain, it was not there. Then I tried to boot using the kernel option
vga=0X318
and then Plymouth started working. I was impressed by the booting screen. Alas! It again landed on the CLI, but this time it was much more crisp (might be due to Plymouth). I did google a bit on the issue regarding xorg.conf not present in Fedora 10, I stepped across a method to create the xorg.conf file. I then did the following steps:
1)$ su -c “yum install system-config-display”
2)$Xorg -configure :1
it created a new file xorg.conf.new in the current directory.
3)Then I pasted the file as xorg.conf in /etc/X11/ and tried to invoke the X-server, it failed…saying that display not comatible.

A bolt from the blue!

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:09:17 +0000

12 December was my Maths examination. As most of my friends know that maths and I don’t get along. But this instant was a little more than expected. I took heavy pounding from the Maths paper. Now I am all flat, lying in bed, and blogging and trying to shed off the frustration…

What a GREAT NEWS!!!! Dunno whether to be happy or sad

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:43:08 +0000

Its 3:00 PM , 1 December 2003. Just now I got my medical report and I am very happy to see that I recovered from Hepatitis. The Bilirubin level is 0.8 now. What a relief! But not for long. Do you know why? Semester exam starts from 4th December. Pressure from all the ends. Last week was a long frustrating week. We had practical exams. Bruised like anything in the electronics and electrical viva voce, but PPL practical exam was great.

About

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:13:40 +0000

I am Ratnadeep Debnath a.k.a. rtnpro. I am an open source evangelist and contributor. I graduated in Computer Science and Engineering in 2011. I have been a Fedora user since 2008 and I contribute to the Fedora project as an ambassador, packager and a developer. I also contribute to the Transifex project. I started contributing to the Transifex project in the early days of 2011. Then I did a paid internship at Indifex from June, 2011 to August, 2011 on the Transifex project. I joined Indifex as a full time employee from September, 2011. At Indifex, I develop cool new apps and ensure that things work as expected. I also contribute to the Askbot project. I also worked on wordgroupz, a vocabulary builder app in my college days. I usually code in Python. When I am not coding, I try my luck with cooking and practise meditation.