So I deleted my Twitter account and joined on to Indentica. Identica runs on the AGPL'ed Laconica and I am hoping Rakesh keeps his promise of packaging it for Fedora sometime soon.

Recently the fedora-india list saw a raging debate on the legitimacy of Web sites like Fedora India, which try to distance themselves from the upstream project through disclaimers like:
"Copyright (c) 2008 Kulbir Saini. I am not related to Red Hat or
Fedora Project. The content on this site is my own views."
... and yet continue to use a domain and Web site name which suggest otherwise.

It all started when Kushal brought up the issue, sparking a few clarifications from the owner of the domain.

To me the issue is not about whether someone has taken permission to use the logo or not. Whether or not someone is employed by Red Hat or a part of the Fedora Project [1] also looks completely tangential to the discussion.

The point is can someone claim to use such a domain as his own personal space to write about a community supported project, when he is not even a part of the Indian Fedora community.

Can someone who is earning good money by working on Fedora [1] still claim that he is not part of it?

This reminds me of something too familiar, but I am not sure whether it will be good to have more of them.

--

[1] Kulbir Saini is part of the project since he is a GSoC 08 student

"... How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?" -- Robert Mugabe

Today while messing around with Vivek somewhere in Kolkata, I came to know about an interesting piece of news regarding our alma mater. Read it here and here.

This is has to be either utter stupidity or sheer brilliance, and I do not know which one.

After a prolonged bout of laziness, I decided to finally do something about Savannah bug #20327. SFTP support for Wget might be useful. After all some of the cool fellows are already doing it.

Although I use Mutt to read my office email, for various reasons I have stuck to GMail's Web interface to access my personal email account. However, I often missed an easy way to send encrypted/signed mails like the other non-Web clients.

Then I came across FireGPG yesterday. Now, is there is something similar for Epiphany too?

The GNOME Documentation Library does not render well on Internet Explorer 6.0.x.

Firefox 1.5.0.1 seems to be much better.

Just came across a post on the info-fsf mailing list about WBUR Boston adding support for Ogg Vorbis. Interestingly they recommend XMMS as a audio player along with the other more "popular" options.

Just point and click on http://www.wbur.org/listen/feed/ogg.m3u to listen to the Ogg Vorbis stream.

This was my first attempt at listening to Internet radio on a free software operating system and was quite impressed by the audio quality. (I have a 2Mbps ADSL connection from Tata.)

Arjun, Rakesh and myself made a quick dash to our alma mater over the last week-end. We managed to eject the juniors from the room which was mine till a year back, and basically had a great time. Many thanks to Vivek and Shishir for obliging and making our stay a pleasant one.

Finally here are some photographs that Arjun sent me few minutes back.

I read about it in yesterday's morning newspaper. Made me proud and happy.

Here is some more: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/webcomics/

Even though I had experienced some weird developements myself last year, it had somehow ended on a happy note. However this one seems a bit too much to fathom.

All along I had believed that past credentials as a contributor is an ace up your sleeve when it comes to Google Summer of Code selections. Favouring someone because their only motivation to contribute is $4500, and downgrading an existing contributor because they will "anyway continue to do good work" is the kind of distorted thinking that I like to hate.

More than 70% of my attemps to view the archives of anjuta-devel@lists.sourceforge.net are met with this:

Add to that the following "sponsorship notice" at the bottom of every post.

Finding such stuff on the Anjuta developers' mailing list just underlines the irony. :-/

I have never realized what people find so special on SourceForge.net. Malfunctioning list archives is a serious issue in my opnion. Now that Anjuta is officially a part of GNOME, I hope they find some better place to host their mailing lists.

Thanks to the Fedora Project I have a paid subscription to LWN now.

I like this: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2008-March/msg00047.html.

I spent much of the extended weekend (Friday was Doljatra & Good Friday) trying to get the camera on my Intel Macbook to work on Fedora. You can find almost all the non-Fedora specific information is available at http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/.

So I went ahead and created a RPM (review request: #438561), spent some time fiddling with udev because I was not getting a /dev/video0 to represent the camera, and then discovered that the USB device ID (obtained from lsusb) had to be explicitly specified to ift-load to get the firmware to actually load on to the device.

As mentioned on http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/ Ekiga was a breeze to set up, but  Cheese was not. Cheese 0.2.4 which ships with Fedora 8 kept crashing with a SIGSEGV somewhere deep inside the GStreamer library. It was a classical case of strcpy(des, NULL). So one has to grab Cheese 2.22.x from Rawhide and update GStreamer accordingly. If you happen to have the gstreamer-plugins-bad packages from Livna then you might be in for a 350MB download. You have been warned. :-)

None of these photographs are taken by me and I believe they are in the public domain. If you hold the copyright to these and do not want them on this site, please let me know.

GNOME Kashmiri seems to be in good hands.