Tag Archives: open source

Demo Talk on “R” – software for analyzing and visualizing data – 29 May

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What: Demo talk on R – free software package for analyzing and visualizing data, part of Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana’s lecture series for promotion of open source Math software
When: Saturday, 29 May 2010, at 3pm-4:30pm
Where: Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration is required.

Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana is a Pune-based research and educational institution for Mathematics. It regularly has free educational lectures that encourage use of open source software packages for mathematics. Click on the logo to go to its website.
Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana is a Pune-based research and educational institution for Mathematics. It regularly has free educational lectures that encourage use of open source software packages for mathematics. Click on the logo to go to its website.

Overview of R

R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software,and is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis. R is an open source software package and is a part of the GNU project.

Abstract of the Talk

This talk will attempt to introduce R, CRAN and http://www.r-project.org/ to non-specialists by a non-specialist. Appreciation of the Package-diversity that is available within R – framework for analyzing and visualizing DATA of all kinds will be the main goal.

Simple Examples drawn from the vast R-literature will be used for this purpose. The aim is to feel the characteristic easy R-style, even in practically useful important tasks.

Event report: Mozilla for you Business

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(Last weekend, Pune played host to Arun Ranganathan, Technology Evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation, Seth Bindernagel, Director of Localization, and Axel Hecht, who co-ordinates localization from a technical perspective, and Ragavan Srinivasan, from Mozilla Labs. We had a meeting of the Mozilla Folks and the Pune Open Coffee Club. POCC member Gurminder Singh, posted this “event report” on the Pune Startups mailing list. It is reproduced here with permission.)

The Mozilla Foundation logo
Image via Wikipedia

The whole session proved to be very interesting. Here is short summary about session on 21st/ Feb 2010 at SICSR Pune.

It Started with Arun’s presentation which covered

Open web platform

Open web platform does not mean open source, it means the standards on which web is based should be open. for e.g PHP is open standard and used by facebook to build million dollar business, Google supports and extensively uses open standards. Organizations should involve in defining and shaping open standards while keep in view the way web is evloving.

Using this open web platform million dollar businesses can be built.

The HTML5 standard has many revolutionary features to change the how people interact with web. One of them is Video

Future of Video on Web

Currently there is no standard format of video on web. We can see avi, mov, mp4, flv etc floating all over. People mistakenly assume flash to be standard because of its widespread use. Flash is a proprietary format from Adobe and lacks the open standard definition which makes it hard for Open standard browsers like Firefox to support it. Therefore HTML5 is coming up with new open format for video “Ogg Theora”. Recently  after a lot of community pressure YouTube announced support for Ogg theora format.

In HTML5 using elements like canvas, video and SVG a video can be treated as data and manipulated on runtime. for eg user can put a video inside a video on the fly. It can be used to make ajax calls on video and running it without any third party software.

Firefox capturing device orientation

With new hardware capabilities like accelerometer very common in devices, firefox has come up with new api to capture device orientation events. This capability can be used for better user experience detecting the motion.

Fonts for web

There was small discussion about a company name typekit.com . Typekit provides user with all the fancy fonts which till today were shaped in some image editing software and pasted as image on website.

GeoLocation

Firefox 3.6 is having support for geolocation api. Geolocation identifies the users location and points it on google maps. Under the hood it uses google gears service.

Web3GL

Future firefox versions (maybe 3.8 , 3.9) will have support for 3D graphics. This is based on web3gl component which interacts with OpenGL to render graphics on screen.

The Mozilla-based Business Idea competition

At the end of session Seth, Arun, Ragavan and Axel organized a small contest where in audience was divided in 10 teams of 3. Each team was given 5 minutes to come up with business idea and present it to audience. Presentation time was 1 min and after questioning about business model etc a winner was decided.

Out of the ten business ideas, these 4 were in finals:

  • Typekit.com for indian languages – typekit.in
  • e-learning classrooms for physically impaired – using video in video capabilities of HTML5
  • Making a video using Mashup – e.g Google maps,text to speech audio
  • Using Geolocation api from firefox – giving user local search results like restaurants

The winner was: e-learning classrooms for physically impaired.

It was great experience to interact with team. We are hungry for more such sessions. Thanks for coming and thanks for reading this through 🙂

About the Author – Gurminder Singh

By profession, Gurminder is a System programmer (C, Linux kernel,Wireless Networks) and has a hobbyist he is a Django, Firefox extensions, and web-2.0 developer. His interests are building useful products(Mashups) using web2.0 components

He is learning new technologies with his experiment http://www.tutit.net. It is a social tuting place, where a user can publicaly store tutorial bookmarks. It is hosted on Google App Engine using Django, Jquery and Dojo.

Gurminder is on twitter as @sgurminder, and can be reached at sgurminder@gmail.com

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An Abundance of Open Source: GNUnify conference in Pune this weekend

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Every year, Pune plays host to a major open source conference, GNUnify, organized by the Pune Linux Users Group and SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research).

GNUnify is one of the top international free/open source software conferences in India. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about GNUnify
GNUnify is one of the top international free/open source software conferences in India. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about GNUnify
Anybody who has any interest in technology should try to attend. It is free, and open for anybody to attend. All you need to do is register here, and you are read to attend two days full of technology talks, and to meet people who are most passionate about technology. Can you think of a better way to spend a Friday / Saturday?

The full list of talks and speaker profiles is give here. Dipen Chaudhary has given his list of 5 GNUnify talks that you must not miss. What is your list of must-attend talks? Please give suggestions in the comments.

There are a bunch of workshops you can attend that will teach you something, like designing with Inkscape, or web applications using python+pylons. There are talks on everything from couchdb, embedded linux using beagle board, closure, future of the web as a platform by the Mozilla team, CakePHP, Android, and much more.

The GNUnify blog is also quite active, and has been publishing short interviews with some of the speakers. See for example:

And follow GNUnify on twitter to get the latest updates on what is going on with GNUnify.

Web applications from the ground up, by Mitchell Tannenbaum

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What: Talk on “Web applications from the ground up” by Mitchell Tannenbaum, organized by Pune Linux Users group, and SICSR
When: Monday, Feb 8, 2pm
Where: SICSR
Registration and Fees: Free for all to attend. No registration required

Details

This talk will cover web applications from a few different angles, starting with what they are and how they are commonly used; this will be a kind of quick behind the scenes look as well a tour of common use cases. Then it will look deeper into building them using two frameworks, Drupal and Django. This will help those of you who are interested in starting new projects and are not yet familiar with some of the available tools.

Next, a look closer at the different projects you can use to assemble your full stack. These are the underlying components of web applications; the most common configuration is called LAMP: Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. However we’ll also cover alternative web servers, database engines, and scripting languages, notably: nginx, SQLite, and Python.

Finally, get some hands on experience with modular development and middleware to see how web applications can be used in all types of environments. This demonstration will illustrate the power of effective and efficient web application programming and how any environment can benefit.

About the speaker – Mitchell Tannenbaum

Mitchell Tannenbaum is a Social theorist and Software architect. Mitchell recently finished his studies at University of Florida where he also worked at the Advanced Computing and Information Systems Lab on distributed systems at various layers. His current technology related activities are with team based software development for cultural growth and economic liberation using free web applications married with virtualization. Also check out Mitchell’s profile on drupal.org

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Submit a presentation proposal for the GNUnify Open Source conference

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Every year, Pune plays host to a major open source conference, GNUnify, organized by the Pune Linux Users Group and SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research). To quote the website

GNUnify is one of the top international free/open source software conferences in India. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about GNUnify
GNUnify is one of the top international free/open source software conferences in India. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about GNUnify

GNUnify symbolizes the philosophy behind Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). It makes an effort to unify and strengthen the FOSS movement. Initiated in the year 2003, GNUnify has soared to become an international convergence of open minds. It brings together some of the world’s leading speakers to share their knowledge and experience, with students and developers.

It has 1-hour presentations on tech topics, 2-3 hour workshops, installfests, and “birds of a feather” discussion groups.

The CFP (i.e., call for papers, i.e., the call for presentation proposals) is currently open, and if you’ve done any work in any open source technology, you should consider submitting a presentation proposal. It helps the community – because more presentation proposals means that the organizers get a larger pool to select from, and can thus put on a higher quality conference. You could choose to do a presentation that is basic, targeted towards beginners and students, to initiate them into the world of open source, or if you have expertise in a specific field or FOSS software package, you can target your presentation to other professionals in the field who would like to learn from your experiences.

Submit a proposal. It takes very little effort right now. All you need to do is submit a one-paragraph abstract of what you’re going to talk about. The conference is on 19th and 20th Feb, in Pune, giving you enough time to prepare.

Why bother?

This PuneTech’s standard exhortation as to why PuneTech readers should submit proposals for such CFPs. We first used it for the CFP of the IndicThreads conference on Software Quality, and are repeating it here with minor changes:

  • GNUnify is a good conference.
  • If you’re accepted as a speaker, you get travel costs (upto Rs 5000, based on actuals) and accomodation. (All those reading PuneTech from outside Pune, grab this chance to visit the most happening tech community in India.)
  • Become famous: being a speaker at a national conference is good for visibility, and all engineers should strive for visibility. It’s very important. Almost as important as being a good programmer. (Maybe more?)
  • Help out a good Pune initiative. More submissions will improve the quality of the conference, and having a high quality conference in Pune improves the overall stature of Pune as an emerging IT powerhouse.

How

Didn’t I say it was easy?

What are you waiting for. Click

“Drupalkar” – an initiative to disseminate Drupal Love to Pune colleges

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(This post gives an overview of a new initiative by the Pune Drupal Community to increase Drupal awareness amongst Pune college students. It was originally posted on drupal.org by Dipen Chaudhary and is reposted here for wider dissemination.)

Overview

drupal icon, svg version
Click on the logo to see all PuneTech posts about Drupal. Image via Wikipedia

In the last pune drupal user meetup ( 26th dec, 09) we all agreed to the need of more drupal awareness as a whole and one of the ways we discussed was to tap the interest early at the student level. To this effect project code named drupalkar (having both hindi and marathi connotations) was planned in which seasoned drupal developers will donate 1 hr to a student gathering in a college to spread drupal joy/way of web development. Approach here is simple, in that 1 hr drupal developer would demo how a website can be made from scratch in 1 hour in form a interactive demo and giving out more ideas and possibilities at the end of the demo. The same would be followed in many colleges with different developers donating time with different demo’s (or maybe same, if one works out to be exceptionally good to catch attention)

Approach

Approach to reach out to students is simple, show something they can make in an hour rather than a speech/talk on why drupal, how drupal? as the talks get incoherent ( its upto the drupal developer conducting the demo session to open up for Q/A which I strongly recommend) and over the time ineffective. We would pickup models from internet and show students how to make that site in drupal and how easy web development is with drupal.

Pilot

To pilot the drupalkar project we decided to pick 5 colleges (list pending and hopefully will be sorted in comments) and 5 drupal volunteers, after which we will map colleges to drupal volunteers and let the individual drupal developer run the show, with some syncing among developers over whats being demo’ed, what was the response etc. As the events would be linear we can adapt and evolve from the feedback of the initial events.

Drupal Volunteers (Drupalkar’s)

  • Dipen Chaudhary
  • Rajeev Karajgikar
  • Parsad Shirgaonkar
  • Nikhil Kale
  • Abhishek Nagar

Colleges

  • PICT (TBC)
  • COEP (TBC)
  • Wadia College (TBC)
  • Narangkar (not sure of the name; TBC)
  • Symbiosis ( Abhishek to confirm)

College Coordinators

  • Arun Nair
  • Amit Karpe
  • Vipul (PICT contact)

Timeline

Tentative timeline for the pilot to be executed is 5-6 weeks, which might be adapted and updated on this page for clarification.

Notes

Drupalkar currently is only for pune and maybe taken over to new cities in India by drupal evangelists else where. I am cross posting this to India group for feedback on the approach etc.

Any comments, feedback on the approach or volunteering is important for success of drupalkar, most importantly we need students and organizers to patch colleges in for the drupalkar pilot.

(Comments on this post are closed. Please comment at the original website)

Drupal Sprint India – 2-day coding event for Drupal developers

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Drupal Sprint India 2009 is a free for all gathering of Drupal enthusiasts from India, who plan to contribute to Drupal development and newbies who want to learn more about Drupal.

Drupal Sprint India will have a non-stop 2 day long sprint where you can contribute by fixing bugs, writing module, documenting upcoming Drupal 7 or helping in translating Drupal to local Indian languages.

Drupal
Click on the image to see all PuneTech articles about Drupal. Image via Wikipedia

Leading the Drupal documentation sprint is Addison Berry, lead of Drupal documentation project. So, if you are a technical writer or you are interested in documenting the best Open source CMS in the world, this is your chance to work with the real experts and learn a trick or two.

For those who love to code, there will be a large gathering of Drupal programmers around the country who will focus on improving upcoming Drupal 7 release by fixing bugs or migrating modules to Drupal 7. Those of you who love to code for Drupal, this is your chance to contribute and gain karma.

But that is not all. There are a few things in store for the non-geeks who love Drupal for its flexibility and extensive nature. Parallel to sprints, there will be talks and workshops to showcase case studies of successful Drupal implementation as well as Drupal’s capabilities beyond a CMS – including Drupal’s ability to integrate with third party softwares such as a CRM, as well as Drupal’s capability to integrate with third party services such as social networking wesbite. So, if you are planning to use Drupal for your next big venture, this is the event for you. Come and meet the best Drupal brains in the country.

So book your calender for October 30-31 2009 and join the gang at Bhaskaraharya Pratishthan in Pune to be a part of the biggest Drupal event in India ever! And yes, do not forget to register for the event, it will take few minutes only but it will help the organizers in organizing things.

CSI Pune Lecture: The Evolution of the Open Source Movement – Sept 16th

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csipune_logo

What: CSI Pune Lecture on the evolution of the open source movement by Atul Kahate
When: Wednesday, 16th September, 6:30pm-8:00pm
Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, S.B. Road
Registration and Fees: Free for CSI members; Rs. 50 for students & Persistent employees; others Rs. 100. Register here

Details:
The evolution of the open source movement:
Open source software is getting very prominent in the last few years, and is increasingly seen as the future. To truly appreciate the power of this, we need to understand its background. How and where did this whole concept of open source evolve? What were closed systems like? It is a roller-coaster journey with plenty of amazing stories and anecdotes. Apart from this, what are the commercial, legal, and other angles of open source software? This session would cover all these aspects.
Coverage:

  • How and where did this whole concept of open source evolve? (Evolution of “closed” systems)
  • Milestones in closed systems history
  • UNIX, C, and the beginnings
  • Richard Stallman and the Open Source Movement
  • Linus Torvalds and Linux
  • The Browser War
  • What is Open Source – The Commercial, Legal, and the Business angle
  • Future of Open Source

About the Speaker – Atul Kahate

Atul Kahate has over 14 years of experience in Information Technology in India and abroad in various capacities. He has done his Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics and his Master of Business Administration in Computer Systems. He has authored 23 highly acclaimed books on technology and cricket published by Tata McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Rajhans Publications on various areas of Information Technology (including editions), titled Web Technologies – TCP/IP to Internet Application Architectures, Cryptography and Network Security, Fundamentals of Computers, Information Technology and Numerical Methods, Foundations of Information Technology, Operating Systems and Systems Programming, Operating Systems, Computer Communication Networks, Introduction to Database Management Systems, Object Oriented Analysis and Design, and Schaum’s Series Outlines – Programming in C++, XML and Related Technologies. Two of these are published as international editions worldwide by McGraw-Hill and also been translated into Chinese. He has also co-authored a book in Marathi titled IT t ch jayachay (I want to enter into IT). Several of his books are being used as course textbooks or sources of reference in a number of universities/colleges/IT companies all over the world.

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Adding FUEL to the Marathi Localization Fire: PLUG Meeting – June 6

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FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization) is an open source project for streamlining the process of translating open source software into regional languages like Hindi and Marathi. We’ve had two major FUEL Marathi meetings recently – one in the GNUnify conference, and later in the Indlinux conference. Based on this, the Pune Linux Users Group decided to continue this work by with the aim being apart from the current active members in Marathi L10N,  find and get more persons from different walks, to participate in Marathi L10N activities. While that being the broader goal, the starting point activity will be standardizing on Marathi translations in FUEL, after which more localization work could be done, depending on resources and level of interest.

With this in mind, all those interested in contributing to this initiative (i.e. all those who can contribute to the Marathi translation project (also known as Localisation or L10N)) are invited to attend the FUEL Marathi meeting on Saturday 6th June, 6pm, at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR), 7th floor, Atur Center, Model Colony, Pune, India (Map). The meeting is free and open for all. No registration required. The meeting will be held immediately after the Pune Linux Users Group monthly meeting, which is from 4 to 6pm. (The PLUG monthly meeting is held on the first Saturday of every month in the same place and at the same time. It’s a good place to meet the most enthusiastic Linux and open source fans in Pune.)

The meeting will discuss the following points:

1. Current status of Marathi localisation: How, why, where, what etc.
2. FUEL activities. How to take it further.
3. Marathi word collection for adding in dictionaries. Validation/verification of these words. (Shantanu Oak has a big repository that needs to be reviewed/verified/corrected and included in dictionaries)
4. Spell check and other related applications/tools
5. Generating new words for various technical English words.
5. Usage of unicode by various categories of users- especially the DTP, book publications community.
6. Pushing Unicode from the Government to the users.
7. etc. etc. etc.  add here…. etc etc etc.

This is not just an “open source” or “Linux” activity. This is for those interested in seeing good Marathi translations of software and is generic to all the computing systems. Please inform other like minded people and groups so that we have enough people at the meeting to give a boost to Marathi l10n activities.

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IndLinux: 2-day meet for developers of Indian versions of Linux – May 16, 17

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IndLinux
Image by fox2mike via Flickr

What: A 2-day workshop intended for all teams working on localization, documentation and development of Indian versions of Linux
When: 16, 17 May, 10am to 6pm
Where: Red Hat Pune, 6th Floor, East Wing Marisoft-III, Marigold Premises, Kalyaninagar, Pune
Registration and Fees: No idea. But, in keeping with the “free” and “open source” philosophy of linux, I would be surprised if the event isn’t free and open for all to attend
Link: click

Details:
A meeting of the various teams associated with IndLinux will be held at the offices of Red Hat Inc., Pune. Broad objectives of the meeting are to have all teams touch base with one another, and work together to chalk out a roadmap for work over the next year. There will be three tracks over the two days of the meeting, with two of these always running in parallel: (a) Localisation track, (b) Documentation track, and (c) Code development track. Specific objectives, and where possible, immediate deliverables for the various components of each track will be set before the meeting.

Schedule:

Day I: 16th May, 2009

Localisation track

Development track

10:00-11:00

Introduction, general queries and concerns

11:00-11:40

Bengali: Runa Bhattacharjee

11:00-13:00

Locales, and related work: Rahul Bhalerao, Pravin Satpute, Parag Nemade
11:40-12:20

Chhatishgarhi: Ravishankar

12:20-13:00

Gujarati: Kartik, Shweta Kothari

13:00-14:00

LUNCH

14:00-15:00

FUEL project: Rajesh Ranjan

14:00-17:00

OCR: Tesseract Debayan

15:00-15:20

Assamese: Amitakhya Phukan

15:20-16:00

Hindi: Rajesh Ranjan, Ravishankar, Karunakar, Ravikant

16:00-16:40

Kannada: Shankar Prasad

16:40-17:20

Maithili: Sangeeta Kumari, Rajesh Ranjan

17:20-18:00

Malayalam: Santhosh Thottingal

17:00-18:00

OCR: Simple approach: Gora, Shantanu, Nandeep

Day II: 17th May, 2009

Localisation/documentation track

Development track

10:00-10:40

Marathi: Sandeep Shedmake

10:00-13:00

Dictionaries:

(a) Finish phonetic rules for aspell: Gora

(b) Phonetic rules for Hunspell: Santhosh

(c) Stardict dictionaries: Karunakar

10:40-11:20

Oriya: Manoj Giri

11:20-12:00

Punjabi: Jaswinder Singh

12:00-13:00

Translation quality assurance: Runa Bhattacharjee

13:00-14:00

LUNCH

14:00-14:40

Tamil: Sri Ramadoss M, I Felix

14:00-15:30

Font converters: Gora, Shantanu, Nandeep, including Hindi work from Google groups.

14:40-15:20

Telugu: Krishnababu

15:20-17:00

Round table on localisation: All

15.30-17:00

Other development work

17:00-18:00

Discussion on emphasising documentation
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