FOSS

I wrote a book on OpenSource in Tamil and it got published by New Horizon Media (Kizhakku Pathipagam) on last Saturday ie., 07-jan-2012 in Chennai Book Fair 2012. If you get a chance to visit Chennai Book fair drop in at Kizhakku Pathipagam stall and grab a copy of the book
(shortly the book will be available in http://www.nhm.in/ online store).

An introduction about this book is available here - http://www.tamilpaper.net/?p=5347

The Rapidly Growing Market for FOSS in India from EFY on Vimeo.

In work I wanted python2.7 for using some latest modules. I run Debian 6.0 ie., squeeze in my laptop, but python2.7 is available in Wheezy or Debian testing. In order to install python2.7 from the testing repository add the following in your sources.list file ie., /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://mirror.cse.iitk.ac.in/debian/ testing main contrib

After adding the testing repository, do an update and then install python2.7 package as follows:

$ sudo aptitude update

$ sudo aptitude install python2.7

My first article - "Creating Professional Presentation with Latex" - for Muktware got publised. This article explains how to create presentations with latex beamer. Following is a gist from the article, to read more visit - http://www.muktware.com/a/14/2011/830/creating-professional-presentations-latex

"If you are a fan of versioning presentations and not convinced with versioning binary files then this article is for you, of course it makes you stand out among your friends since this is how geeks prepare presentations. Latex is a popular document preparation system which provides a document markup language to edit your documents which looks beautiful in paper.

Back in 2008 I started my Master of Science course in Birla Institue of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani. Last semester I completed all my papers related to my course work. This semester I had my dissertation which I completed a couple of weeks back.

I gave dissertation viva voce yesterday ie., 19-oct-2010 to Mr. Kiran D. C who was interested in Subversion and asked many related questions about my dissertation work. My dissertation was based on Subversion titled "GPG-agent based secure password cache for Subversion Version Control System". As of now this work is maintained as a separate branch (gpg-agent-password-store) in apache subversion project repository. Though the branch is in working condition and does the intended job, there are many more changes planned before merging the branch back to trunk.

Yesterday ie., 30 September 2010, I conducted a workshop at Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Sivakasi which was organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering exclusively for Faculty from various engineering colleges in and around Sivakasi. In the morning I gave a talk and hands on in Subversion Version Control System and in the afternoon I handled Python Programming which was also a hands on workshop. 

We had a total of 35 faculty members from various colleges. The session was interactive and also I was amazed to see everyone eagerly trying out  stuff which I taught.

Last weekend ie., 25 September 2010, myself along with Mr. Joe Steeve conducted a one day workshop on Free Software Technologies at Kalasalingam University, Srivilliputhur which was organized by TIFAC-CORE in network engineering and Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University.