Adieu Durgapur

So. today is  my last day in Durgapur, I will be moving to Ahmedabad for next two months.

Having some mixed feelings as this is the first time I will be out of my home town for long, best song suiting the mood now is  Tanha Dil by Shaan

Catch me if you can!

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Catch me if you can!,
originally uploaded by Subhodip Biswas.

My catch yesterday

Mapping party@ Durgapur and neighboring places (16th and 17th Oct 2009)

There has been a discussion between Indranil Das Gupta and us regarding the problem we face due to lack of GPS devices and some more mapping parties in Durgapur area.

On 16th and 17th we decided  to map  Durgapur and neighboring places. Primarily Kushal wanted to map his village and we decided to help him to map his village Ukhra and also map Durgapur . IOTA resource center at WBSU(Barasat) extended us a  helping hand by lending us three Garmin Etrex Vista H. So with the new gps’s in our hand we now had a total of 5 GPS.

On 16-OCT-2009 :We went to Ukhra on 16th to map the village.Me,Arindam,Kushal and another guy from that village joined the party. Since we had two bikes and the village was small.We completed all major roads and even some narrowest living streets within  an hour.

Here is how Ukhra looks like now as compared a complete blank previously.

On 17th Oct 2009 : A resource person from WBSU was suppose to come during the event but he didn’t make it though .So We started around 1 Pm. I was a little late but Arindam,Harsh,Sonu,Ratnadeep and Bama started.

Ratnadeep and Bama became the local team.They mapped Fuljhore (where they live) along with neighboring areas.While the rest of the team went on cycling covering edges of Bidhanagar area.

I met them in Muchipara and on my way I mapped some of the important point of interest.

I had the etrex H GPS devices, so distributed them and we split into individual teams.

I had a Moped while rest were in cycles.I tried and mapped some far away place like PCBL,Durgapur Bazaar etc. Arindam and rest took charge of mapping the area with details. Sonu knew the place very well and helped us a lot with that.My GPS clocked 34.4 KM after more than an hour of mapping. Our meeting point was BCET gate.

We met and decided to head over for some food as day long traveling was taking toll on us. We accumulated the total distance covered which was something around 100KM’s. Bama requested us to take a GPS to map his city in Bankura so we lent one of ours. So some good  amount of data was accumulated  during the session. Since it was a festival day we decided not to do a editing session and it was dark already. Me and Arindam took care of the edits which will keeping pouring  during the weekends.

Here’s some of what has been done.

Durgapur before edits :

And here is durgapur after basic edits of 17102009 data

Here are some pics of Edit in progress.

Another Edit in Progress screenshot:

There will be a follow up post soon as edits are done.

Rally De Kolkata – My experience

Eastern region of the country witness a National Rally Championship after 4 years of dormant period.Since there was a gap,this rally was really hyped about. But even though it was rally de kolkata the stages were actually held in Durgapur.

Sept 17 : Initial plan for Day 1 was a 23.5KM dirt stage with two rounds in it.But since it was raining heavily in Durgapur ,It was until the last moment the stages were cut short by almost half (12KM) with two legs a 5.79KM and 6.22KM run thrice.17th was the pre event day.I was planning to attends the press conference but because of rain I reached late which was good,since most reporters left, I was able to chitchat with some rally drivers including Amitrajit.It was an amazing experience.

Sept 18 : The event was supposed to flag off from Hotel Ginger at around 7AM .I reached there when 4 cars already left.It was my time to hurry to the stage which is almost 50KM even from Durgapur.On reaching the stage , I made an attempt to reach the spectator point 1 but rain and dirt made a good mix and my car got stuck.However was able to reach the start point.The track was dry and hard , very good for pace filled rally ,which which everybody started . It was me first time witnessing a rally of this sort.I walked almost a KM ahead into the first corner and made a spectator point myself.It was hot,sun overhead so after SS1,it was not so easy to make to 6.22KM stage ,so went back home and kept an eye on the live updates. The track took its toll as news came by people were crashing some can’t keep the car in control and unfortunately Vikram crashed due to wrong information from the officals into Arjun Balu’s car .

Sept 19 : The stage on duel was suppose to start on 7:18AM and stage on gram at around 8:16AM ,Easy for rally cars but not for me.so stayed back home and kept an eye on live updates.Day 2 has seen most of the actions and upturns in leader board,including someone hitting a cameramen near FF.Most biggies were out due to mechanical faliures including some Gypsy’s.There was even a holdup somewhere in the middle of the stage.

Sept 20 : Day 2 has already seen Gaurav Gill in comfortable lead of 1 min and 17 sec ahead of Amitrajit Ghosh followed by Sujay in 1600cc Baleno. Spectator Special Stage was held in Jadavpur Stadium in Jadavpur ,Kolkata. The competitors lined up at around 3 PM.But Gaurav got stuck in wet ground  .His front wheel drive cars has enough grunt to make the pit deeper.But with help from his service crew,he set himself free. The SSS was tough on esteems who were already struggling with the 560KM of travel of which more than 460 was just Liason stages. Gypys’s flying and so are baleno’s but both cedia made the SSS really special. Gaurav clocked the 2km stage in 1:25 and Amitrajit in 1:27 . So Gaurav wins as he extends his leads by 2 more secs.

Some points to note :

1. 460Km of transport stages is too tough on cars .it could have been less.

2. Officials could have been a little bit more experienced,On Day 2 the top 4 cars almost got penaltied due to a silly mistake by a marshal .

3.Privateers suffered a lot because of last minute decision changes which sparked anger  in them(as far as current rally.co.in forum posts goes ).I also feels the same.More coverage and attention on privateers would have really helped the event.

4.As most participant are from  South of the country, number of entries were 38 as compared to 60 in K1000 Bangalore.

As an event this was great to watch.Hopefully we will be able to see it next year again. I learn’t a lot about cars,driving styles and met some great drivers  and my trigger happy me was really very happy.

Mapping party in Kolkata_Aug 2009

On August 9th,2009(Sunday) we are having a mini mapping party in Sontoshpur/Jadavpur area of Kolkata.Its a 8hr mapping spree with socializing afterward.

Check http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kolkata_Mini_Mapping_Party_August_2009

So If you are in Kolkata at that time and have interest in OSM, Please do join the party

Random Scriblings

Tommorow I will be going to Jamshedpur(India) to attend my brother’s wedding, Since Jamshedpur has almost no data for openstreetmap . I am taking  my GPS with me. Hope to do some traces.

On the other news :

1 ) openstreetmap.org home is now available in 4 languages : German, French,Icelandic ,Slovanian and some partial spanish .

Thanks to london hack weekend .Many more have started working on their native languages. However  no Indian languages support till now.

2) JOSM has a good amount of foreign language support, Me and Meejan has started to work on the bengali interface and some work has been done.

3) Potlatch and Openstreetmap wiki translation is also ongoing

If you are interested in seeing Indian languages in these tools , We would be happy to accept your help .Visit here for more details.

4) Arun Ganesh and H.S Rai will be representing OpenStreetMap India in upcoming State of the map 2009 to be  held in Amsterdam(Netherlands) from July.

5) Now osm.org routes to openstreetmap.org as well

Fedora Activity Day@BCREC by dgplug

So finally the Fedora Activity Day which was supposed to be held during Horizon’09 in April was held over two in 14th and 15th May,2009. The reason was that horizon got canceled due to some reason.

Here is a complete jot down of the whole two day experience

Day 1 :

We started a little late.At around 12 noon because of the projector was not working laptops.With  audience size was around 30 we started.

Arindam started by introducing the fedora project to the students. he introduced the Four F’s of the fedora project along with the community as well. He in fact introduce all  bits of the project.

Next was Kishan and Me , we tried to bust most of the misconceptions about linux/fedora in general.

Next we decided to actually give the students a demo of what the busted few minutes ago. Debashree, Amrita, Arpita showed them inkscape and gimp. Rangeen, me and arindam showed them video and music in Fedora.Along with Rangeen showing them KDE 4.2 and it attracted attention. Every machine in the Lab was running FEL live cd since there was no persmission to install Fedora in those machines[:(].

Whole of this continued till 2:10 and we decided to take a break.

After break we continued, this time 15 more students from electronics and communication branch came and joined us.

We introduced IRC to students and gave them a brief demo of it.

Then Rangeen started with FEL. He introduced GNUSim8085 and Ktechlabs which attracted most interest. There was power cut and outside was cloudy, so it was dark. but somehow even with UPS ans trailing machines rangeen continued.After the UPS gave up. We formed small groups of 8-9 and used out 5 laptops to demonstrated FEL. The session went along over 2 hours.It was a comprehensive demonstration and was a good one.

Due to lack of power, we decided to call it a day and gained permission to continued over the next day.

Day 2 :

We started day 2 with Some basic commands by Harsh Verma (a new fedora ambassador from dgplug). He showed them efficiently. Even showed the use of man and info pages. Me and Arindam  helped Harsh with this session. We showed them chmod , file permissions and a word of caution”not to login as root in GUI”.

The next session was vi by Dibyanshu. He gave a very good session on vi and showed most of the cool stuffs. I, personally liked the session very much.This guy is very new to dgplug but is showing great enthusiasm.

We took a break of 20 min and returned . Ratnadeep started with his GCC session. We decided to take on small assignments and started doing them using GCC. Ratnadeep did gave a comphensive demo of GCC and did well. Arindam decided to help them using Anjuta IDE and the same assignments were done using that.

This went till almost 5pm, power went out again. But I took my java session in my laptop. Showed them openjdk, the difference between openjdk and sun jdk. And how to install sun jdk in fedora using alternatives. This went on till 5:45pm and decided to call it a day.

The feedback was good. event though number of audince was less but it showed enthusiasm. Hope to get good contributors from this pack. There will be a post FAD session after the semester exams to keep nurturing this enthusiasm.

Over and all the session was successful and a good one.

With this session we  gained permission to install fedora in a machine. And me and Arindam decided to use this as a local mirror for the labs and students. Need to sort out some techical difficulties though. It currently behaves like a mirror in a box.More on this soon.

My cam’s battery gave up in mid ways so didnt clicked much , anyways pics are here :

Server Downtime(API 0.6 going live ) 17th-19th April 2009

“Expect server downtime during that period. The current API will go into Read Only mode at 10:00am BST (9:00 UTC) Friday 17th April. You might need to upgrade your editor to use the new API after the work is complete. There may also be some hiccups in the following days.”

Technical Details here.

Announcement is here.

Head scratch

It has been one whole year since I turned 21 and  I will be asked what I have learnt in last four years.

Lucky me ^_^

Google Summer of Code 2009

Well, like previous year  this year we are also in Google Summer of Code 2009. So if you are interested in OpenStreetMap, This is the right time to do so. You can take a look at potential project applications here.

Not so good :(

Okay, My mac’s keyboard seem to be b0rtked.

If i press these keys ‘4”r”f”v’; I get this : ‘45”rt”fg”bv’

Is this a hardware problem??

install fest @KGEC

On 21st feb , We (/me ,Arindam ,and Ratnadeep ) boarded the 5.40 AM bus to kalyani (for the FAD at Kalyani Goverment Engg.College,Kalyani). However we faced a small political unrest@memari that made us leave the bus and board the next available local train . Finally after changing 3 trains we reached there .Rohit (KGEC) came to pick us up .

On reaching the campus we were amazed to see the crowd waiting to  register their names .We went upstairs to their seminar hall and there were lots of people already there .Indranil Das Gupta was the chief guest,Rangeen was already there along with Sheyank and Mitesh from NIT durgapur (they had taken 50 Fedora 10 dvds with them ).

Indranil Das Gupta started with his introductory speech , and it was well recieved .He talked about mainy things but to sum them up ,it was an introduction to FOSS community for future contributers .During his speech  a lot of teachers were there  who were keenly interested regarding this , I heard that their Electronics HOD was using linux for last 4 years.

Indranil’s  speech lasted till 1 PM and then he left for kolkata . Our talks started after the lunch .

Arindam gave a nice introduction on fedora project.I spoked about myths about linux (with help of fedora). Since most of them were begineers these talks were well recieved .Our session lasted till 4 PM .

After our talks, Rangeen and Ratnadeep took charge of the install fest which lasted till 7 PM .even though they patiently did a informal one till 2 am .

Pics are here and here .

A more detailed blog is here .

Past few days (including mukti09)

Last few days were hectic to me as there was lot of things that was happening around me .

6th Feb : It was Mukti 09 day ,  a national level tech fest on opensource at NIT Durgapur . Me and Arindam had to do a talk cum workshop there .Our Pre Mukti talk was canceled due to bandh and got 3 hr slot , It was scheduled at 5:00 PM .

However we decided to go a little earlier because we along with Indranil Das Gupta and Yu Yu Din were suppose to go and visit Bijra High School .It was at around  12:30 PM when we reached there ,met with Indranil Das Gupta and Yu Yu Din and started for Bijra ,but before we left the campus we called Pradeepto and took him too .At around 1:51 PM Debayan called us up  for setup at fedora stall as they are lacking volunteers but we were already on our way to Bijra .

In Bijra , there were lots of stuff that were happening , Bijra school is getting lot of aids from different section of society and they are utlizing it for a good cause .Both Yu Yu and Pradeepto liked it very much . and lot more things were discussed .

We returned to NIT campus at around 4:30 PM and headed toward IT department where our ” A day with fedora ” were suppose to be done .We started a 30 min  late at around 5:35 PM .Satya came along but she was too tired as she just finished a talk .

There were some 50+ DVD’s that were distributed along with registration kits , I asked Debayan for 15 more DVD’s to distribute in the event just as we were on the start , Nevertheless we started with Arindam’s introductory talk on “Introduction to Fedora” , He had some cool slides where  he showed ” Freedom | Friends | Features | First ” of fedora project .He also showed some cool videos like ‘Truth Happens ‘ , A video showing new features of F10 ,starring stickster and gergdek .Next was my turn , I gave talk on “Myths about Linux ,Busted with fedora ” where i showed basic misconceptions on usage of Linux . A video on ” Why fedora ” by gregdek is shown along with the talk .

Finally we conducted a small workshop on ” How to create bootable live usb for easy use “  . The local mirror of NIT was b0rked and Debayan mailed us regarding that a day before , anyways we continued with as much we can , and finally got 8 machine getting all that we need . Arindam hosted his local FTP server so that people find it easier to download .The workshop went alone and was quite successful .We faced a lot of questions , a guy from NIT agartala said the workshop was useful as  he can now got a solution to their connectivity problems . Finally we ended with the “Choice” video .

We had dinner there and finally returned home at around midnight .

7th Feb : Me along with Arindam ,Indranil Das Gupta and Yu Yu Din boarded the 6:14 AM train and went to Kolkata where IDG had to give talk . We went to IDG’s office and waited and finally went to Science City where talks were held . M Arulraj gave a talk on Open GIS . IDG gave his talk , I don’t remember the tittle of talk though . and one talk was on FOSS in bio informatics by Mr. Sudip Kundu .

Finally we all went to kafuluk at china town and had our lunch cum dinner there ./me and Arindam went to my house at sontosepur .

8th Feb : Woke up early and came back to Durgapur by taking 7:30 AM bus . It was “brigade cholo ” day , the bus we took was the last bus available as most buses were hijacked to bring in people . Reached Durgapur at around 10:30 AM and went back to NIT Durgapur at around 12 noon , On way to IDG’s talk ,we went where stalls were hosted , apart from Dominos and CCD rest were empty .IDG’s talk on “Indian FOSS Community was superb ” and at it was the last talk of mukti 09 .

NIT Lug guys did a superb organizational effort to bring up such a event and overall it was awesome to see so much participation .

Fedora Event pics are here .

Random Scriblings

Theres quite lot to  say :

1. Gave one more talk on OSM at mukti 09

2. Visited Kolkata Book Fair and help folks at IOTA stall .It was awesome .Detailed blog coming up

3. Fedora talk at mukti 09 on 6th .Event page up (need suggestions)

4.Visited bijra today and had lot of feedback (complaints) from them .

5. Got a lit of petrol almost decades after recent price cut for RS 50.

6. Harman Baweja still cant act .

7. Sign of twitter becoming mainstream in India .Read here.

First Barcamp and Tweetup at Kolkata

At last kolkata got its way to barcamp and tweetup , Though situation of the city made its presence on the people attending the barcamp.

I reached barcamp venue at IITKGP EXT center at around 10:15 AM .The preparation were still going on , However people started coming only after 11 . However organiser decided to wait for a little long for some more people to come up .

At around 11:30 AM things started , Sessions were superb , the timeline can be found here .

I did a session named “fun with JOSM” in which i introduced OpenStreetMap and JOSM and it did  earned some attention .

Some of the interesting session were by Shwetank Dixit , Amitabh Choudhary,YuYu Din,etc .

At around 6Pm things packed up .

on the note : IIT KGP guys did a good organising on there part ,wifi were working ,and food was good .

The Barcamp twitter followup can be found under hashtag #bckol ,

And hey #bckol is a trend in twitter : see here .

After Barcamp we decided to had a tweetup , There was a little confusion over the place but we decided to move to Mani Square for the Tweetup .There were seven people ,@subhodip,@aritra_m ,@indradg,@imba ,@epandu ,@yuyudin and @tathagata .

The tweetup followup can be searched under hashtag #tweetupkol

Indradg wasnt a twitter user but after the tweetup he is

The tweetup was superb as we come to know many people and it was fun .

So , The barcamp has finally started in kolkata and its our turn to keep the momentum up .