September 17, 2011

SFD 2011 Software Freedom Day 2011

SFD ‘11 @ IT-BHU went well, explore some photos here. Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and encouraging its use.

Many thanks to Tabrez and all the students who attended the event. Hope they will continue to use Linux and open source applications for the rest of their lives. A gist of what went, for your reference:

Brief history of UNIX, FSF/GNU and Linux, why Linux?
Distribution of Ubuntu CDs, Goodies
Students tried to partition/Install/Try-Ubuntu
People inclined towards Windows, tried Ubuntu on VirtualBox
Tour of Gnome and some basic commands.
How to install software on Debian/Ubuntu based Linux distros.
Where to get started with GUI based Linux application development using C/Gtk+ or C++/Qt4.

July 12, 2011

R2A2 My super duper android powered Rover

A premature mock-up of my anticipated ~~masters project~~ side project, R2A2 (credit to my big bro for the name), thanks to Avinash bhaiya and Gaurav bhaiya for ordering/getting me some of its important parts which includes; the gas sensors, IOIO (Android USB interpretor), Rover5 platform and the robotic claw. No promises but I hope to complete a working prototype of my super duper android powered rover soon before ~~2011~~ 2012 ends :)

November 1, 2010

Twisted Fun Asynchronous networking

After hours of hacking through the source code of BoincVM originally written by David I finally understood the architecture and workflow. I’m rewriting it (it’s now called VMController), fixing bugs and implementing features as part of my B.Tech project, with some help from David (the amazing). Twisted is awesome, it’s an event-driven networking engine written in Python which we’re using in VMController. Below is a cartoon I drew on my whiteboard to show what’s really going on inside VMController (host). Read the report.

September 27, 2010

YouTube Integration in VLMC GSoC 2011 project

I’ve successfully completed my GSoC project (t-shirt is the proof :) for VLMC (VideoLAN Movie Creator), progress and report of which can be tracked from my VideoLAN GSoC project’s wiki page. VLMC is a non-linear, cross-platform and open source video editor that uses libvlc in the backend.

Apart from the YouTube integration features, I implemented support for network proxy, ported VLMC to Mac OSX and revamped the CMake based build system to automate packaging for Mac (App Bundle/DMG) and Linux (rpm and deb). I also extracted the YouTube video uploading code as a reusable library, libishare.

The whole experience was awesome, many thanks to etix (my official mentor), choquette (my unofficial and most helpful mentor), j-b (gsoc admin) and members of the VLMC community.

UPDATE: My code now lives in VLMC’s official git repository and I’m given commit access yay! Checkout my commits; this particular vout-detached-widget bug on Mac OSX was squashed during a sleepless 48-hour marathon.

July 20, 2010

CERN Experience Eight week internship at CERN

During the last 8 weeks I worked as a volunteer summer student at CERN with my awesome mentor/supervisor Dr. Ben Segal and the CernVM team. I continued work of past CERN summer students on BOINCVM (volunteer cloud computing platform for scientific research based on BOINC infrastructure) by improving code, fixing bugs and testing on Linux, Mac and Windows, using the CernVM virtual software appliance. I also improved server side configuration and administration of a test BOINCVM project. Read report; Attestation.

Work aside, I met some amazing people during my time at CERN. Above is a photograph of the office which I shared with 5 other facinating people for sometime before I shifted to another office. My schedule was tight (I had my GSoC too), but I cruised through both of them; my secret was this chart:

Experimental physicist Dr. Archana Sharma helped all of us, the desi student crowd at CERN (thanks a lot ma'am!). Below is a photographic panaroma of Dr. Sharma’s house where about 10s of students and few scientists had a desi get-together:

My mentor, Dr. Ben Segal arranged a tour of CERN Computer Centre for us (thanks a lot sir for making that possible!). Below is a photographic panaroma of the server farm;

I was so thrilled to stand next to the NEXT computer that ran the world’s first web server, which was written and managed by Sir Tim Berners Lee himself.

Our group photo just outside the CERN Computer Centre:

Bonus video: