Deb's Blog

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...

12:30AM last night, gotten done with the meetings & calls - almost worn off - I was about to get my dinner & call it a day (for such long of a day it was). But what do you know! Got summoned by my Ingress faction for a call of duty - awkwardly eccentric, insanely probabilistic, extremely difficult, and yet immensely confidential task that needs to get done exactly at 4:30 in the morning, at a place 3hrs by road. Hence, I grabbed my gears & rushed for the pick up (with a couple of bread-slices in my pocket; because, Dinner) - and there's no looking back. In simple words - it was a covert operation of ~16 Ingress Agents, to transport an artifact (#2) from the origin portal in Bangalore to the destination portal at Mahabaleshwar (then undisclosable) - lots on XMs were spilled in the process & to defy the Resistance's effort to... well, resist - the process... & keeping it under Enlightened-control, strategically (12hrs) & effectively (4hrs). ...

I woke up quite late today, and as usual found myself in the flood of device-notifications. Swimming through, I couldn't help but notice that there's one recurrent theme against many of those conversations - actively, or passively; which is, me being termed as the "Co-founder of Mozilla India" in my FOSDEM talk's introduction. Some congratulations, some giving justifications, some asking for justifications, some efforts to clarify the situations, some smug comments & inquiries etc. And I realized, the issue is not as innocent as it first appeared, and something is needed to be done to fix it. For what it's worth, I am not the one who scripted the introduction. I've had very little to do with it. Clarista is such a nice person, it seemed rude to stop her on stage. I made a little hand gesture, "Please, let it go... I'm not that guy." but anyway, that message didn't pass through. I've been anonymously volunteering for Mozil...

Foreword For last 2 years, I've been trying to attend FOSDEM, and yet each time found myself to be too late in the process to do anything about it. Missed the last year's Firefox OS awesomeness badly, and thus had my reminder set to wake me up when September October ends. Facts & Figures The Campus Map of ULB, along with the Dev-Rooms FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting) is a developer-centric event, hosted at ULB (loosely translated, Open/Free University of Brussels ) that brings together 5000+ geeks from all over the world. There were quite a few keynotes, main-tracks, and along with that 33 Dev-Rooms - that is project specific focus groups, each diving deep into their topics in separate auditoriums. The entry is walk-in, until/unless the room is full. The event in itself is free of any registration, or other charges. Mozilla had the Dev-Room UD2.218A on Saturday, and there were 16 awesome talks in total . You can get...

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...

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...

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...