Okay, this post is to do with my life out of the Fedora community.

Here’s a mail I got from CodeChef . The contest is only for Indian students this time, and weirdly enough falls right in between my end sem exams.

Hi Ankur,
I’m writing to let you know about the CodeChef Campus SnackDown, our biggest contest ever, specifically for Indian college students.

<snip>

The details of the contest are included below:

· ACM ICPC style contest with two rounds

o   Round 1: Online Programming Contest on 21st Nov. 2009, Saturday 4pm-9pm

o   Round 2: In Person programming contest on 10th Jan. 2010, Saturday

· Students can form teams of three

· The team which performs best in your college will be recognized on CodeChef

· The top teams from all over India will be flown down to Mumbai for the in person round

· Prizes of Rs 3 lakhs in cash to be won!!

So go ahead and ask your members to register their teams here: http://www.codechef.com/teams/register/SNACKDWN

We have given the details about the contest on our blog: http://blog.codechef.com/2009/10/27/the-super-gigantic-mega-announcement/

Cheers,

Basil Skariah

The poster can be found here:

http://ankursinha.fedorapeople.org/cc_snackdown_poster_1_final.jpg

Just got my system upto F 12 today (11.92 actually).

Everything works. The installer played bug free, nouveau is looking good (do i need kmod-nvidia anymore?)

The new network manager interface looks awesome. I noticed some improvement in bluetooth too. Anyway, it’s just been half a day. More features to praise and more bugs to swat as we go on!!

With just a few days left for the final release, I’m sure this one’s going to be an even bigger leap than Leonidas. Go Constantine!!

One of the LUGManipal folks has written a “how to get Pidgin working on ION wifi”.

It can be found at the mailing list archives here:

http://srv12.rackedhosting.com/pipermail/discussion_lists.lugmanipal.org/2009-October/000721.html

We’ll put it up on the forums and wiki soon.

As the heading says, I was thinking of packaging a screen saver with Fedora community event pics.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-August/000945.html

Spot’s frog screen saver gave me the idea. What does the community think ??

We have a lot of pics to choose from, and I need your help  short list.

From Nicu’s albums:

http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/photos/fudcon2009berlin/page028.html

http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/photos/fudcon2008brno/

You can find more pics at Flickr etc

Its been a really  long time since I came across one of these.. Couldn’t resist .. lol..

So, two of us, Ambassadors here at Manipal are starting a sort of a campaign to increase the number of students using Fedora in college.

This is the first part of the campaign: The poster

I’ll keep the blog updated with the other steps that we take. If there are any changes needed in the poster (as per guidelines etc that I could have missed), please comment or email me at “ankursinha AT fedoraproject DOT org” . I still have 4-5 days to put these up.

Hi folks,

An announcement regarding fpaste : A simple tool for posting info onto fpaste.org.

It’s a python script that enables you to paste the output of a command, or a file to fpaste.org. For those who are unaware of what fpaste.org is, please click the link . It’s a pasting site that comes in very handy when the folks at #fedora help people troubleshoot (since pasting more than 3 lines on #fedora earns you a well deserved kick) . The package includes a well written man page for those who’d like to learn it’s usage.

I’m very grateful to Jason ’zcat’ Farrell (upstream) and Rahul Sundaram (package reviewer) for making this so quickly possible.

I pushed the packages to cvs and bodhi last night. They will hit the repos soon.

AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!!! That’s all I can say..

….
…
…
…

(31/32): xulrunner-devel-1.9.1.1-1.fc11_1.9.1.2-1.fc11.x86_64.drpm | 675 kB 00:22
(32/32): yelp-2.26.0-5.fc11_2.26.0-6.fc11.x86_64.drpm | 150 kB 00:05
Finishing rebuild of rpms, from deltarpms
| 90 MB 00:04
Presto reduced the updates to 15 M from 90 M which is a 84% savings.
Package(s) data still to download: 417 k
(1/6): gvfs-archive-1.2.3-9.fc11.x86_64.rpm | 63 kB 00:01
(2/6): gvfs-fuse-1.2.3-9.fc11.x86_64.rpm | 26 kB 00:00
…

…

Okay, so I finally decided to take it up a notch.

I was going to update F10->F11.  Choices? Preupgrade, clean reinstall.

Preupgrade failed on me (because I have a separate / partition which fell short on space)

Clean reinstall: Problems::  I don’t trust me DVD drive. Netinstall was outa the question.. (A 25Kbytesps net conection , what? are you kidding me?!!)

So I gave the USB thing a try. Set up a partition on my external hard drive with the DVD iso etc. and ran it. Everything went smoothly until the packages menu. “Could not find DVD iso source….” (  Since it had wiped my F10 while getting here, I was on a Windows only system for the first time in 2 and a half years. Seriously, it did NOT feel good. I got to #fedora somehow looking for anything that would get me back on Fedora. Nothing did. . And no one could understand why !

So we prayed a bit, and put in a DVD with our hearts stuck in our throats…. and it worked

That was the worst day part.. Now the best day portion: F11 rocks!! Hail Presto. Hail boot up!! you folks know the rest, need i say more? Copy backup back to your system and you’re good to go..

The weird part is, Windows let me burn a dvd, Fedora din’t.  That’s something I’m going to look into.

Folks, this is just a rant!!

I was supposed to take a 6 a.m. train to Kolkata. A plane from Kolkata to Bangalore at 4p.m. and a bus at 10 to reach Manipal(college) early tomorrow morning. I’m sitting at home writing you this. Why??? Aha!! A very interesting and !@#$%^&* story. Looks like they thrashed up an MLA (Member of Legislative Assemble) in West Bengal. Hence, politicians (who have nothing to do) announced a 12 hour “Bandh” from dawn to dusk. Now, a “Bandh” in West Bengal is very special. I’ll tell you why:

People , supposedly party supporters, take to the streets and SCREW UP everything. For example, my train would not have been allowed to enter West Bengal. They stop you in the middle of NO WHERE on the state border. You can either get off and go back (somehow, fly I guess) or wait in the damn train until people get off the track at the end of the “Bandh”.Last time this happened,the train my father was travelling in, (unfortunately to Kolkata) got held up for a full 24 hours!! Even if I did make it to Howrah by train, there would be no mode of transport to reach the airport. Another example, they stop the buses, make the people get out, and then torch the bus. How romantic!!! Bloody @#$%^&* !!!!

All of last night, we sat up trying to figure out a way to make me reach the airport. ( A 3 hour drive in the middle of the night was an option, rejected because roads during a “Bandh” are not safe. The above example would clarify this.) Ultimately, after discussion with a lot of his friends etc., dad directed me to reschedule my flight, my train and my bus ticket. So, I’ve now paid 8000Rs for a flight that I had initially paid 3000Rs for. I luckily or not so luckily managed to get one of the last two seats of a bus (lucky because I got a seat,not so luckily because these are the *BEST* seats in the house), and the best part is, it’s because some body got thrashed somewhere!! This is apart from a new train ticket .”I’m soooo soo damn happy! “

I feel better now, not so much because all my plans are nothing less than DEAD. I reach college on a Sunday, when virtually, I can do no work apart from shopping for toilitaries(Toothpaste and soap.. 10 minutes). Airtel would be closed, so I can’t apply and get my internet. Hero Honda would be closed, so can’t get my bike serviced. Everything in Mangalore would be closed, so I can’t get the new charger for my laptop. And classes begin Monday! *Hurrah*!!

If these people had wasted this time on something constructive, the world would certainly be at a higher standard today.