Deb's Blog

I was about to go full epic-narrator mode , but I'm barely keeping it together. Subjectivity will creep in, can't help it at the moment. I _can_ still try to explain it in a succinct, bullet points, matter-of-fact way, but I'm choosing against it. So, it'll be a bit long winding story, unlike most of my posts. What I lost can't be downloaded, borrowed or recreated. There were one of each of those things, and now there aren't. I don't expect anyone else to 1:1 grasp how I feel about losing 4 years worth of hobby projects, things I brought to life to be no longer there - so, if you're like "yeah, not like anyone died... chill out & quit bickering about it" I don't really fault you for that. I don't have a pet; I wouldn't quite understand how losing a pet may feel either - compared to someone who does - at least not to the same extent. So, please excuse me while I write its obituary, cause I want this to stay as vivid of an example...

In this post, I'm gonna briefly raise some key issues & suggest half-baked solutions about events in India. It's heavily focused on developer-events, but some bits are pretty generic. These are from the discussions, experiences and findings under the lights of the following events: MozSetup at IITKGP ProgramIIEST at IIEST (duh!) ...and some more events since the late 2013 Before I dive in - like a side-note, I'd like to mention - since 2012, we've tried to increase developer contributions in India heavily. Some low hanging fruits , to start with; and they have generated results . Now it's time to take some further steps, and evolve further. But there are some blockers. Very real ones. Most challengingly(!), non-technical ones. Thoughts on developer-hosted events They are Procedural They can plan properly and execute efficiently. Something that's not vastly common in South Asian region. They are Innovative Given an opportunity, they m...

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...

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...

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...