Part of our 21st July campaign is formation of GLUGs all through the state of Andhra Pradesh and inspire these groups to spread the use of GNU/Linux. The GLUGs that we are thinking of are not just "users groups", they are expected to go much beyond...

Though I would not completely agree with the fact that the rural India is ready for a rapid penetration of computers... I think it can slowly start. People need to know what computers can do for them, they have to feel the need for computers and that feeling and the dissatisfaction would bring the next revolution. Again, its my opinion and I would not mind trying other ways of spreading computing to rural India... after all, as bunny puts it, trying it out can only have a zero impact if not a positive impact.

Now, when people start using a computer they would come across all those difficulties that we the so-called computer literates came across when we first used the comps. Fortunately, we had our instructors and friends who helped us out. A GLUG should be the same instructor/friend to the people around their college. Only then a unit would be self-supporting and that would infact improve usability and peneration of computers in rural India. GLUG as defined by its role, will be a very important unit of the Free Software Revolution in India.

FSF AP now had a strong network of people trying to build GLUGs in the engineering colleges all through the AP and hope the GLUGs thus formed sustain the self-supporting units in their areas!

Long since I blogged and in the process left out many activities that are worth more than a simple mention in my blog! In the last couple of weeks, we have been coordinating with the Free Software Foundation of India (FSF), Andhra Pradesh chapter to bring computers and Swecha in particular to the rural parts of Andhra Pradesh.

On the 24th and 25th of June we had a workshop at IIIT Hyderabad. The response was great and the participation clearly meant a great future for free software and for the rural India!!!

• Session 1 (Philosophy)
  
• Welcome note by Dr.Rajeev Sangal (Director, IIIT)
  
• FSF Philosophy by Kiran Chandra (FSF-AP)
• Session 2 (Paradigm Shift)
  
• Proprietary to Free Software by Bunny and me :)
• Session 3 (Techie)
  
• Networking in GNU/Linux by Prof. Reddy (JNTU Kakinada)
• Session 4 (Future work)
  
• Discussions about formation of GLUGs
• Closing note and conclusions
  

Finally the outcome of the workshop was to bring Swecha to 21 villages, create 21 GLUGs to support the spread of free-software and have a common collaboration platform... all by the 21st of July!!!

This is what Cox had to say when speaking at the launch of an advanced technical computing group for Wales, run by IT Wales, part of Swansea University's computer science department.


Don't know how i missed this, but this is the first time read this article. The complete article can be found here...

Happened to read an article (political?) about an amendment to the patent law in India. Here is what the article had to say about the amendment.


Indian software industry is mostly based on services and has very few products to its credit, that also means that we have lesser original work and patents. Software patents becoming legal could mean supressing Indian software industry from entering the world software product market!

Given the disadvantages, NASSCOM is said to have supported the government too. Is NASSCOM which is known to represent the Indian software industry really representing the smaller companies???

[Thanks, rajan for the link]

Was reading a few articles about software patents. I am pretty sure that more people than not are NOT AWARE of what could be the implications of software patents becoming legal. So here it is, an image from typo3.org which more or less summarises it.


Imagine paying royalty to someone just for using a progress bar or a tabbed dialog! yuck! It sucks.

Here are a couple of links for more information on software patents. No prizes for discovering that these links are among the first few google results for "software patents":

• http://www.ffii.org/
• http://petition.eurolinux.org/
• http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/

Now that I worked on the eenadu2utf thing for a while, I got used to having look at the eenadu site. When I did that today morning, I was surprised to see that barely anything could be readable on the site... So what was the problem?

A missing "meta content-type" tag, the browser (firefox) failed to recognize the encoding used in the page (homepage of eenadu.net) and hence was not able to display the text!

I am sure the folks at eenadu would have tested the page before uploading it to the server, but the worst thing did happen, they probably tested it on "Internet Explorer" only.

This probably is another great disadvantage of unusual encodings - the browsers don't recognize them.

Eenadu is one of the most read news papers in Telugu. The online edition of the paper is at http://www.eenadu.net/. Don't worry if you cannot read it, the site currently uses a strange
encoding, which can probably only be displayed using the "eenadu" font which is downloadable from the site. There is a huge telugu corpus going waste in a proprietary encoding! huh!

Apart from a few other things, this was one that kept me busy for the last week, finally after hacking the font, and reverse engineering their encoding, I could create a script/program that converts a given html page from eenadu.net to a UTF-8 encoded web page.

For now, the script can probably be used only to convert pages one after other, but if every thing goes right, it should be possible to convince the eenadu team to migrate to unicode... Hope it turns out this way!!!

Yet another simple plugin for blosxom.
Just wanted to add quotes to my blog... and failed to find a plugin that meets my requirements! The fortune plugin can

• Give you random quotes
• Based on configuration it can also give you the source of quote saperately
• The database is a blosxom post that follows the unix fortune file format
• Add/Remove quotes directly from your wikieditish. Its like any other post!
• The quotes file will not appear in any of the listings, unless asked for directly!

Try visiting http://tux.medhas.org/static/quotes.txt, to see the quotes file format and the list of quotes I use on my blog. btw, the plugin can be downloaded from http://tux.medhas.org/static/blosxom.html.

Wow! I can do PERL. Though not an expert I can manage using it when required. :)

Heres a blosxom plugin that can be used to maintain a list of your blog's articles as bookmarks. The plugin like wikieditish comes in the form of a flavour for adding/removing a bookmark. Demo? My blog is the best demo for this plugin!

The latest can always be downloaded from http://tux.medhas.org/static/blosxom.html

"Use Firefox", "Use Konqueror", "Use Mozilla" and "Use Opera". These phrases were indirect ways of asking others not to use Internet Explorer. Similar to many other people around the world I think its time to be direct... time to say "No IE". I recently stumbled upon an interesting article titled "Stop using Internet Explorer!". I hereby testify that my pages will be fully clean and will be built to the standards as defined by the W3C, but not necessarily viewable correctly with Internet Explorer.

Here are a few reasons cited by the author against using Internet Explorer:

• It is insecure. Many exploits were discovered in it so far, and more are constantly discovered.
• It lags behind other browsers in standards-compliance and so prevents web designers from using some very nice tricks in their pages. Some of this is caused by the many bugs it has.
• It does not have many of the usability features that more modern browsers like Mozilla, Opera, or Konqueror have. Use a different browser for a while and you wouldn't want to switch back.
• You'll need to upgrade the OS, to update it, as Microsoft announced that it won't be updated separately anymore.

As already said... I will build my pages to the standards as defined by W3C and not to the standards as defined by Internet Explorer. Help build a standards complaint web, stop using Internet Explorer.