Archive for the ‘FOSS’ Category

Just for Fun – Linus Torvalds

November 10, 2010
Just For Fun

Just for Fun

  • It takes design & good taste to be simple.
  • The act of delving into someone’s passion would be akin to “invading his soul”.
  • In the American version of the game, you draw the enemy lines and the skill rests on one side’s ability to be divisive. European politicians tend to win by demonstrating they can foster cooperation.
  • “FO OF” is the hexadecimal representation of the first two bytes of an illegal instruction sequence that made Pentium CPU lock up.
  • Golden Rules: Number One: “Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.” If you follow that rule, you will always know how to behave in any situation. Number Two is “Be proud of what you do.” Number Three: “And have fun doing it.”
  • First Survival. Second your place in the social order. And then entertainment. The three things that make us do the things we do.

Posted in Biographical, Books, Computer Science, FOSS, iCons, Linux Kernel, Self Education, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Free Software Song

November 9, 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSkCny-HtTw]

Posted in FOSS, Videos | Leave a Comment »

Indian Linux Localization Video

November 9, 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vljou-mE6gM]

Posted in FOSS, Technology, Videos | Leave a Comment »

Linus Torvalds – On Starting Small

November 9, 2010

Found at Emergic.org

Linus Torvalds

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say “hey, that _almost_ works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.

And if there is anything I’ve learnt from Linux, it’s that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your “vision” too strongly on them. Most often you’re wrong anyway, and if you’re not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you’ll never get anything good done.

In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don’t expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I’ve been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I’d never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that’s how I thought about it.

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poMMo – PHP based mass mailing software

November 9, 2010

poMMo

poMMo is a PHP based mass mailing software or say web app. In my previous organizations I have used PHP-List for deploying a mass mailing solution. PHP-List was good it had more features and ability to handle more number of email addresses per list. In my current organization, I was unable to configure PHP-List. We even thought of buying official support from PHP-List. Then one day just strolling here and there on the web I found poMMo.

It has a very nice interface, very easy to install and very fast. It has 3 ways of sending the mass mail – from smtp, from sendmail and from php mail function. You can also control the number of mails you can send through within an hour every hour. It doesnot have the stats feature ready yet, but the developers are working on it and will be there in the next release.

Of all the PHP based web solutions seen so far I love wordpress, phpbb and pommo.

Posted in FOSS, PHP, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Free eLearning a.k.a eTraining for FOSS Technologies

November 6, 2010

iTunes University has some of the best video podcasts from some of the best computer science faculties from some of the best Universities in the world. Its a boon. Open Courseware has come to life.

Sadly, Indian premiere institute IIT-Mumbai has produced something called Spoken Tutorial. It lacks in each and every aspect of a training material.

I really wish I could have made my screen-casts based on WinK like 4 years back, when I was really enthusiastic & active about it. I did get a mail from Vector Linux, Canada – applauding my effort.

Posted in Computer Science, eLearning, FOSS, Personal, Self Education, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Intranet for a Corporate

August 8, 2009

I am designing an intranet for the 3rd time, first was in college, second was @ previous employer and now @ my current employer. I am enjoying working on it now as I have to justify each and every step, back it up with research and screenshots.

So an intranet makes sense for companies who work on lot of projects where there are lot of people say even 10 projects running at a time with say around atleast 50 people working on it, which is 5 person per project. For knowledge based companies and for creative companies it becomes a bare necessity other wise they will be redoing a lot of there work again and again. Intranet for a educational institute especially those who impart technical or managerial training make much more sense because without they would be repeating the same cycle again and again. With the Intranet they would create a knowledge base of lot of students and help a student march much more faster in the road-map of acquiring more skills using richer resources.

There is no out of box intranet still available especially for educational institutes. Since the needs of every educational institute is the same, the solution will also be the same, hence I see yet another opportunity in making a cool project idea out of this blog post which is “Intranet for a Corporate”.

Lets have a look at some of the out of box Intranet solutions. They are:

  • FLOSS – OpenAtrium (http://www.openatrium.com)
  • SaS – BackPack (http://backpackit.com)
  • Proprietary – Intranet Dashboard (http://idintranet.com)
  • SaS/FLOSS/Proprietary – Cyn.in (http://cyn.in)

The one which has all possible features is Intranet Dashboard (ID), whereas the most KISSED (keep it simple and social) is BackPack. Features of ID are exactly what my company intranet demands. Some of them are which I could have not even thought of.

I have to do lot of research tomorrow and they after tomorrow and make prototypes based on the research. Its saturday & sunday still I have to go as I have to make a delivery on Monday.

I will share all my research findings here on Monday. So keep watching.

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