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Showing posts from 2013

Optimizing Fedora Startup Performance

Disclaimer: This isn't a full course meal on the topic - just the main course. I'm concentrating on the low-hanging fruits here & ignoring stuffs which require excessive amount of warnings without significant impact. In case you're interested about the ignored bits - you may wanna check this blog that covers some of those parts: http://www.harald-hoyer.de/2013/11/13/fedora-boot-optimization/ Update 2: Reviewing the Fedora 20 change-sets , I have a feeling that although following is a generic way of optimizing Fedora startup - there are so many radically awesome changes inbound with Heisenbug , that you should definitely consider a fresh install to get rid of many ghosts of the past (if you can afford to). To start with I recently (yesterday) performed a fresh install of Fedora 20 on my test-rig & then onward, rebooting my other system appeared to be considerably slower (compared to it). This is a system on which Fedora 17 was initially installed & th

Linux Containers and Docker for application portability

Recently I've been looking up on the Linux application portability & the already available options. Not under the hoods, really - just the overview, to have an educated opinion. Docker basically is DotCloud re-organized - one of those early-birds to leave their PaaS business & take this up. It takes Linux Containers (liblxc) as its base & then provides an abstraction, implemented in Go. They're in a process to use more abstraction, and implement better environment for app-portability (using AUFS, and even BTRFS) to further reduce the complexity of dealing with containers & contained applications. It kind of targets Ubuntu as the platform - haven't stumbled upon any doc that says they've plans for other Linux distros - I may be wrong. Going deeper, Linux Containers is a wrapper around the Kernel to expose many/most of its features. It uses Linux control-groups (cgroups) heavily, and can expose Kernel namespaces, SELinux, Seccomp etc. to w

Mozilla India Blog is open-to-all

TL;DR : Now, anyone can register & post on Mozilla India Blog . Let me be straight here : It's nothing new. It has always been there - but general feedback from the community implies, it isn't always obvious to get... Okay, point taken. JUST. PUSH. THE. BUTTON. Dammit! From the very moment of configuring the Mozilla India blog, the new user registrations was set open (OFF, by default) - so that the community members can contribute to it. The default WP configuration puts the SignUp/LogIn links at the bottom of the sidebar - which may be difficult to notice. Although, if someone searched, would've found it - we needed to make it more vivid to the community, that it's not a obfuscated fine-text sitting there just because it has to. We had to make it more prominent, that if community members have a good point to share & need to have their voices heard - they can use this platform. After all, that's what it's for - right? So, there you go... The

MODS Bangalore 2013

The Event The Mobile Developers' Summit is an annual event hosted by Saltmarch. This year it was at Bangalore, last 10-11th of October, 2013 at the NIMHANS Convention centre. I was invited to speak on behalf of Mozilla about the "Firefox OS and the power of HTML5". [ Slide Deck ] The Talk The talk revolved around the idea, how Internet as a Platform changes the game, what myths do we have around it and pointers to what changes in direction we can already see. To some extent, it compared the capabilities of Native vs. Web applications - with little brief on how easy it is to make web applications to be device-compatible, and how the market ecosystem is different & more meaningful than the rest. Showed a couple of demos, insights about the platform & gave some contexts of WebApp development.  In the end, tried to demonstrate the world map, where Firefox OS has already launched, and the opportunities of Indian Freelancers & Startups in the glob

California, here we come... DinoCo, here we come!

So it begins... Hundreds of Mozillians from all over the Asia has already started taking off for Santa Clara, California to attend the Mozilla Summit 2013 - the largest Summit we've ever had! This is historic; THIS IS EPIC! Not because of the numbers, but for the enthusiasm, reach & impact it will create. Prologue There are also two other locations where the summit will be hosted parallel to each other, with (almost) same tracks & schedules - in Brussels & Toronto. Grossly, Mozillians from Europe attending summit in Brussels, Mozillians from Latin America, Africa & Middle East and Canada attending are in Toronto, and the ones from Asia and USA will be rocking at Santa Clara. Participation According to the list of invitees, Mozillians coming in heavy bunch are from India, Indonesia, Phillipines, Japan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Sri Lanka etc. which is almost proportional to the strength & activities in those respective Mozilla communities. There are plenty of

Brace yourselves, a new Mozilla India is coming...

WIP title: Releasing Krakens... an entire army of them! Peek-a-boo: New visual identity of Mozilla India... Yay! Well, the idea of Foxy hugging the Ashoka Chakra as the logo had to be thrown into the gutter - too many objections about potential abuse of the country-emblem. Though, I fail to see how hugging your mother can be considered a nefarious act! Now, to the main topic; TL;DR: The new Mozilla India websites is live & kickin', also it has got some new platform-integration (& underlying infrastructure upgrade). The Mozilla India developers have been at work for a while now & things have started to shape up. The Platforms & the Infrastructure I'll be mentioning these two terms way too often below, so I'd rather give a brief: Platforms : a software stack on an OS, allowing us to achieve some task in particular. Some lose examples would be blogging, content management, documentation, API, content serving etc. Infrastructure : the hard

Stepping down from ReMo Council

Yes, you heard it right. No, there's no sad story behind it. Also, the decision is not made in a hurry. In fact, I've been trying to figure out my purpose & impact as a council member the moment I took up the duty — and soon after, I came to the conclusion that it's not really my thing. Being in the Council empowered me as a Rep & I'm glad to have helped in the Mozilla community activities globally, and especially in South Asia. So, there are lots of reason why not to, but there are a couple of reason for me to retire; and here's why: Focus I can be more effective at my other parts of Mozilla contributions (mainly around Developer Community Building in South Asia), if I step out from some of all those things I'm involved with. There will be another blog, listing them down & delegating responsibilities accordingly, where applies. Time Being in the council means dedicating a huge amount of time reviewing/approving budgets - a continuous i

Overstepped the threshold - time to take a step back or two

August 1st, 2013: I've got 178 actionable emails in my inbox. A partial snap of my inbox of this evening with the emails which dodged all the 50+ filters, headed directly my way & need quick attention — it's not a sudden spike, and there're some emails missing inbetween, which I've replied to, archived, before thinking of taking the screencap — but you get it, right!

Mozilla India Workweek 2013

The Task Force leaders of Mozilla India gathered last week(end) to sit together & brainstorm about the intra/inter-taskforce operations in our community, and thus to carve the foreseeable-future pathway of Mozilla India. ============================================================ Event Page : https://reps.mozilla.org/e/work-week-india-2013/ Task Forces : https://wiki.mozilla.org/India/task_force Responsible : Priyanka Nag Accountable : Soumya Deb Support : Event Task Force, ProTravels Consulted : William Quiviger, Pierros Papadeas Informed : Vineel Reddy Pindi ============================================================ N.B : Event report preparation has been delegated to Documentation Task Force, starting with this event, and moving forward (allowing me to go nuts in my own blog post). Expect the complete report by the end of this week (which requires summarizing dozens of etherpads of the teams).

MozCamp Asia 2012

Albeit two entirely different kind of events, for me, the MozFest and MozCamp 2012 were more like a two-lap circuit, with a couple of hours' pitstop at my work-town. But still, I think each of the event needs a separate post, because they are quite of a context switch, and difficult to narrate on same pitch. So, my MozFest post went on ahead , and here's the post about the MozCamp 2012. Oh, bytheway - here's the not-so-organized Flickr set for the impatients: http://www.flickr.com/photos/im-phreak/sets/72157633063798684/

MozFest 2012

Claimed to be the largest Mozilla hosted event , Mozilla Festival is the place for creative-developers to share & show-off. With that being said, I've had the pleasure to attain MozFest 2012 at London, last November - allow me to share the joy ! Looking back, the entire event has so many tales to tell - but, as most of them are best told over a coffee - I won't take you through all the trivial details here - rather, let's just get down with the facts:

MozTI @ BESU: Mobilizing Mozillians in Kolkata

MozTI @ BESU: Organizers From left: Subhasish Kundu, Soumya Deb, Sayak Sarkar, Priyanka Nag, Shambo Bishnu, Amrita Roychowdhury, Gaurab Patra, Ramit Das, Avik Pal, Sankha Narayan Guria, Kaustav Das, Swarnava Sengupta & Arijita Das