Small Cycle Tour

Yesterday I completed a small tour (13.24 miles i.e. 21.18 Kms) on cycle. In case you cannot see map embedded below, please try this url.


View Larger Map

Gnunify 2008: Enlightening Talks

I attended GNUnify 2008 at SICSR. It was really good, thanks to Organizers, sponsors (Intel) and speakers. Following are my notes of of talks I attended.

Day 1 (Friday, 8 Feb 2008)

Workshop on shell scripting by Gaurav Pant

Basic shell scripting concepts were discussed. I wrote couple of simple bash scripts, things like comparing 2 numbers. I think scripting will be useful to make multiples runs (in different directories) of a program on different data sets.

Visual design by Niyam Bhushan

The talk was mainly to motivate developers to pay attention to user interface design, aesthetics and end user. I plan to learn Gimp and Inkscape and see how far I can go.

OLPC by Sayamindu

Introduction to OLPC project, hardware, software (Sugar interface) and localization effort. Since laptop is for school children Sugar interface has concepts/metaphors like neighborhood, friends, home, and activities (which are basically software programs). Interesting project for people passionate about educations and teachers too. Will this project benefit millions of children in villages of Asia?

Is localization really needed? Children are quick learners, they should be able learn basic English very quickly.

Day 2 (Saturday, 9 Feb 2008)

Open source by Brian Behlendorf

Really good advice from a open source veteran. Open source projects need commercial companies around it. Companies can then represent customers and their needs to developers.
Each company typically should offer something extra to differentiate itself from others.

Then he talked about how IT consultancy companies are offering open source technology to their customers. Many IT companies are going for joint IP rights on the software developed for a customer. This allows them to reuse the software for other clients. Example could be an IT company having many banks as their customers. Because some operations are very similar across banks, software can be reused. This phenomenon blurs line between offering services and products.

Building open source company Chander Kant

Chander Kant founded Zmanda which offers database backup related software products. He shared some excellent advice on starting open source companies. Following are my notes.

• [ Open source company ]

Apart from free software philosophy, following are plus points of a open source company, in the
order of increasing benefit.

1. Save development cost. Benefit here is 0 in most cases. Do not count on developers in community working for free.
2. Testing and QA. Since products can be downloaded for zero cost, many people in the
   community will download the product and provide valuable feedback. Make sure that
   it is easy to provide feedback and communicate.
3. Marketing and Adverting. Open source products benefit from word-of-mouth publicity. You need not spend large amount of money/effort on marketing campaigns.

• [ Business Model ]
  

How do does a company plan generate revenue? Business model should be designed to tap potential customers and revenue.

1. Support/documentation for a open source product/technology.
2. IT Consultancy, integration and custom software development business.
3. Yearly subscription (updates, supports). How to decide on subscription fees?
4. Appliances (integrate with hardware and sell the hardware).
5. Software as service (paid?)

• [ Where do I start ]
  

1. Develop a software program to solve a interesting problem. Do not underestimate your program. There might be people we want to save effort and want to use your program.
2. Identify existing project which solves your problem. Start contributing.
3. Sometimes you will have to decide on starting from scratch vs reusing existing project.
4. Develop significant user community.
5. Make sure that project has a good leader who can motivate team and give direction.
   

• [ Funding ]
  

1. Initially start on your own.
2. Find a "patient VC".
3. Avoid temptation to spend money on Marketing.
   

• [ Watch Out ]
  

1. Watch out for competition and differentiate your offering.

After presentation, I clarified my doubt related to use GPL licensed library for custom software development. Overall it was really good presentation with practical advice from someone who have been successful in building a open source company.

Later in the afternoon I attended talk on "Multicore Threading" by Vasanth Tovinkere from Intel. I will probably publish my notes in a separate post.

Alu parathas in the SICSR canteen were really tasty. It was good to see young students successfully organizing a technical conference.

First Day: OpenOffice.Org Writer 2.3.0

On Thursday, I installed OpenOffice.org 2.3.0. Thanks to Sun Microsystems for providing installer DVD at conference FOSS.IN 2007. Before that I removed old version (1.1.0?) of OpenOffice.org. With good software tools make writing documents is a enjoyable task. This post describes my experience on first day of using OpenOffice Writer.

First impression was “Wow, GUI looks better than 1.1”. Since I extensively use styles while creating design documents, I tried to define/modify styles (actually modify existing one) and keyboard shortcuts.

1. Choose Format >> Styles and Formatting >> Paragraph Styles >> Header x >> Modify

2. Style modification form pops up (Shown in figure below, I will refer to this form many times). A style has many properties (like font, alignment, position etc.) which can be set to desired values in the form.

3. In the same form, I was hoping to define numbering and keyboard shortcut for each style, but could not do it successfully.

4. After spending few minutes, I figured out how to define keyboard shortcuts for styles. Choose Tools >> Customize >> Keyboard. It turns out that OpenOffice.org by default assigns shortcuts to Header x styles (Control-x to Header x), which is fine. However style modification form does not seem to have a way to link styles with keyboard shortcuts.

5. However, for numbering it took me whole afternoon (3-4 hours) and still could not define numbering for each styles.

6. Eventually I found that style modification form is not the correct place to associate outline numbering with styles, even though form contains tab called numbering.

7. The correct place is Tools >> Outline Numbering as shown in the figure.

So important question is why can't style modification form have some way of specifying style numbering? There seems to be some issue with this, interesting details are in issue database issue number 5038. I wonder if I can take a look at relevant part of source code and make sense of it.

The outline numbering is also used to generate table of contents (choose Insert >> Indexes and Tables).

Now I wanted to save modified styles and use it for all other documents. This can be done by defining templates. Choose File >> Templates >> Save under suitable template name. To set the new template as default template choose File >> Templates >> Organize.

Summary:

On my first day of using OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 writer, I managed to define styles as I want and get started and play around with other features. Although it took me some time to figure out style numbering and found some related issues (unless I am missing something).