Greetings! Long time no blog…
Just wanted to let people know that the deadline for next issue of GNOME Journal is April 1st. Please get us your fun and interesting articles to us! You can mail me at:
sriram_*_*.ramkrishna_*_*@gmail.com
Other than that. It’s been pretty busy, finished off a very interesting class on operating systems and now looking forward to a class on network architecture.
Just a quick note to remind everyone that article submission deadline is due February 10th. We’re looking for about a total of 5 articles. So if you have an idea for an article, please mail me and let me know your ideas!
Well, that’s it. I’m not very witty on blogs.
Just want to wish my friends around the world a very happy and prosperous New Year and that I hope all that you wish to accomplish this year comes true.
Best Wishes!
Just a reminder for those who are writing articles or even want to write articles that the deadline is August 1st.
If you like to write an article and don’t know how to start (it’s easy!) bug us on irc in #gnome-journal or just subscribe to the mailing list.
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That said, I had the advantage of doing several interviews including one through VOIP. I’m sure these people are all wondering what happened to the interviews I’ve done. I haven’t gotten around to them since when I came back I was hit with a lot of work and with my wife out of school, we’ve been busy with home stuff. So I’m hoping that I will be able to get articles in by August 1st.
So, I haven’t been around the last couple of days with my house full of relatives. Yesterday, my wife after four years of hard work finally earned her degree in dentistry. It was a great time, we had two commencements; one was at the school itself and there was a more grandiose version that involves all the disciplines at a more formal locale in downtown Portland, at the Arlene Schnitzer Hall. The local commencement the class president was trying hard to not break down and cry during his speech. A good guy.
One’s interesting this time is that this is the first time that OHSU managed to stream the hooding ceremony. Reports from relatives in India was that they were all able to see it clearly. This is pretty good news. Alas, they used Real server to accomplish it. Obviously, we need to apply a little marketing to use Fluendo server might be more interesting. Next time I’m up on the hill, I should probably do a little speal on it.
(wow, I managed to say something GNOME related here. 
Anyways, being gone for the past couple of days have made it hard for me to do some of the press work for GUADEC that I had volunteered to do. I had written down a couple of “mini-articles”. It’s a little hard to figure out the “marketing” since they are marketing. As usual, I’m probably over-complicating the issue. But I’ll probably post something to the guadec-list on what I have later today if I get a chance.
So once again it’s been forever since I’ve actually blogged something. We had some reorganization at work and it’s been kicking my ass in a majuor way. I’ve had no time to do anything useful other than to whine. My one claim is that I managed to write one article for GNOME Journal. The last release was somewhat disapointing as it didn’t seem to get as good a reception as the previous one. Maybe it’s just my perception I don’t know.
I’ve decided to give “gimmie” a try. Gimmie as people have noted before is sort of a replacement for your panel and consolidates common, repetitive tasks to a single location. I deleted my bottom panel and replaced it with Folgers crys.. er I mean gimmie. I’ve been doing this for like over a week now and I don’t miss my panel. I’ve also been able to delete the applications menu on top. My only complaint is the hideous pastel colors. I think Alex was in L.A. too long. It would be interesting to turn this into a type of panel in GNOME.
Finally, I’ve decided to help out with GUADEC, in the Journal section since it seems that writing and marketing has been more my forte of late.
One final note on GUADEC, Quim Gil needs your help! It’s the last stretch and this is probably the hardest, most tension riddled time for Quim and I speak from someone who has been on a planning committee for a conference; this is the time for the GNOME community to help out!! Quim is probably too busy to actualy ask for help but please go to http://www.guadec.org/ and sign up to volunteer your time in helping GUADEC be an awesome event. Even if you’re not able to show up, I’m sure any time you could sink would be much appreciated.
I had my 37th birthday May 11th, and it was pretty pedestrian. Hard to believe you’re that old. I don’t feel that old, I feel the same as I did when I was 25. I guess you only feel as old as you think you are.
Anyways, the birthday was pretty pedestrian but I did manage to watch a hindi movie called Yaadon ki Bharaat . As with most bollywood movies there are a number of songs on it. This particular movie was made in 1973 and has a number of hippie references right down to the headbands. I’ve known the songs since I was little, but never watched the movie. Mostly because I’ve had situations where you really enjoy the songs and then when you watch the movie it’s this exceptionally painful, cheesy scene that you have to somehow erase from your mind in order to enjoy the song again. The songs, and the movie did not disapoint! What struck me though was the sophistication. The sets were way better than anything in the 80s, and the incredible wonderful wardrobe of Zeenat Aman ! The 70s were probably the best time period for Hindi movies. There was an avante garde attitude to the whole thing. Something happened around the late 70s, and I suspect that the “social police” decided that things were going out of control. I consider most of the movies made in the late 60s to the late 70s to be some of the best of indian cinema.
The story was okay, but not the best but it was an entertaining three hours and it’s worth it just watching Zeenat Aman and the funky dancing!
The GNOME Journal team is once again getting prepared to write some articles and we encourage others to write some kick butt articles for GJ.
The deadline for the articles is Feb 1st so if you have an idea to write about please contact us and let us know what you’re doing so that we can put it up in the wiki.
On the personal front, things are going well. I’m going to be doing a project on some xorg hacking. Check out XCB. The initial project is to write a reference window manager. Should be fun as my first class that lets me hack on free software.
There’s been a lot of talk from the mono folks about Banshee. I’ve looked at Banshee and what they have is pretty impressive; a great piece of work. However, don’t count out Rhythmbox! Our CVS committing action has been stupendous with a steady march towards 0.9.3. If you’ve been using the breezy version of Rhythmbox, you’ll see some cool features if you try out HEAD.
I’ve done some work in breaking out rhythmdb out of rhythmbox which was fairly easy to do. The idea is to be able to have a canonical source for a music database. My knowledge in databases is pretty near zilch so it will be a challenge trying to do something with this considering the amount of free time I have.
Saturday, My wife and I going to inner tubing on Mount Hood. That should be a blast. I really wish though I had one of those pocket cameras so I could take a picture on the way down! I’m looking forward to having some fun in the snow.
Ahr, mateys! It be pirate talkin day and I be talkin like pirate, ahr!!
Back from vacation about a week ago or so. It was a great trip and I feel pretty relaxed. Some tension with relatives and trying to spend time with everyone but thats the way it goes when you visit there. The worst thing was that I forgot my charger for my Canon and ended up lugging all this equipment for nearly nothing. I managed to take a couple of photos which I will add later.
This week I start school, working on my Masters in C.S. I am taking a class in Computational Biology which is a class observing patterns in genomes. Apparently you can apply several algorithms related to pattern matching to genomes in order to figure out bad genes.
We are going through a massive reorg in our IT department and I’m waiting for the dust to settle. I think I’m going to see if there are other opportunites in other areas. I”ve been doing this job for nearly 9 years and maybe it’s time for change. Sysadmining can be fun especially here where there are new problems all the time.
No work on GNOME at all. Sad. I’m working on my guitar these days in order to actually accomplish something!
Well, it’s been over 10 days into my vacation in India and I’ve been having a grand time and I haven’ gotten sick yet.
My sister-in-law’s marriage went off pretty good and we had a great time with everyone there. I even did a little driving in Bombay which can be a little disconcerting. But as long as I believe I own the road, I was fine.
Man, I’ve been eating like a pig here too. 3 square meals plus in between snacks, and caffiene. All part of the fun.
I will be in Bangalore tommorow for those who are in Bangalore and want to meet up, let me know and mail my gmail account (sriram.ramkrishna@gmail.com) I’m leaving for Goa on the 30th afternoon. Unfortunately, I’m not able to IRC since I’ve been on dialup for the last couple of days and it’s really hard to get online and download stuff. I might try again from a cybercafe later.
Hope all you GNOMEies are keepin it real.
Last day of OSCON
So this is the last day of OSCON and it’s been a full (and fun) week doing stuff like the booth. While a lot more hectic than last year since I didn’t have as many volunteers to help was still enjoyable talking to various people who come to the booth.
One interesting tidbit was that the Mayor of Portland runs KDE. I do intend to send him a livecd so he can perhaps change his mind. But still, he’s running a linux based laptop and thats pretty cool. I had it confirmed by a couple of state government employees. Unfortunately, none of the city govt folks showed up. There was even one guy from the General Accounting Office (GAO) as well. All took some live cds.
Big thanks to jeff and Dave Camp for helping me out and hanging out and talking. It was fun having them both there. When Dave wasn’t hanging out he was over at the Gibsun Guitar booth rocking out. (btw dude, I got myself a gibsun guitar t-shirt thrown at me! 
The one observation I have while doing the booth was the complete lack of females approaching the booth. No matter how hard I tried to catch their eye they’d never look. The whole thing was so intriguing I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what they were interested in and what made them go there. It seems from observation that they like booths with a lot of colours, and marketing materials, and what not. Apparently, GNOME is not appealing to women or I’m not, or it’s not flashy enough..dunno. We need to be more women friendly. We need manly men, with chiseled chins, and long flowing hair. GNOME should be about sex..er sex appeal rather.
I’d like to also state that OSCON seems to be GNOME land. When people were not running OS-X or Windows it was GNOME. Whether it was redhat, suse, or ubuntu thats all I saw. So, that was really nice to see.
Had some good conversation with one of the mozilla guys about how to create a community especially around Q&A/bugzilla etc etc and also discussing the difficulties and risks of moving Firefox to timed releases ala GNOME and Ubuntu.
Next year, I’d like to see OSCON do more on linux desktops and also having things like flumotion streaming for the outside community.
Enough for now.
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