The 10th and sadly last foss.in took place this week in Bangalore. I was there for all three days of the conference and it was great. This time around we were 6 students from my college. In addition, at the last minute a lot of KDE developers did turn up, including Vishesh Handa, Pradeepto, Abhishek and Sujith. Danese Cooper’s opening talk about the architecture of Wikipedia was inspiring. That one of the top 5 websites in the world, is powered by just 450 servers and 60 people is an inspiring tale of open source skill and passion.…

There is a certain fun in hacks, little projects you do on a whim and finish in a few days. And then you go and buy a domain for it and launch it. That's Mugshot. Mugshot is a web service which offers face-detection. It uses the libface library which was implemented mainly as a Google Summer of Code project for KDE. So one day I was thinking that services like Facebook and Flickr allow you to upload images and then tag them.…

The Synapse website undergoes a over-haul every year to stay in sync with the theme for that year. Since the last year, I’ve been the webmaster and programmer for the website. Which means I do all the HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/SQL dirty work. This year’s theme for Synapse is “Silver Screen”, having to do with legendary movies and so on. Their is always the need to bring something new to the website, something that differentiates it from a normal website.…

Its been ages since I’ve got a post up, but I have my excuses. I have been working on a static site for myself, self-hosted and with my own domain name. I thought I would only resume blogging once that was done, but it is going to take some more time. Now with December a week old, it is time for my customary brain dump about the entire semester. In many ways these posts are highlights of the semester according to me.…

I’ve released the first version of the UPnP MediaServer KIO slave which allows KDE applications to seamlessly browse UPnP devices on the network, and access their files. An outcome of my Google Summer of Code, this is the first step towards getting UPnP Collection support into Amarok. For now, the slave is meant for application developers since dolphin & co. in KDE 4.5 do not directly know how to launch it.…

The usual convention in open source is that new developers get into a project by themselves. They follow online documentation and get into IRC channels and find their way around by themselves. Its not often that we get the chance to meet new guys and teach them the ‘tricks of the trade’. But that is exactly what happened at Hackfest @ Shaastra 2010 Hackfest got together mentors from various projects to introduce students to contributing to open source projects.…

I’ve now been on tmux for quite a few months since migrating from screen. aterm + tmux + zsh + vim makes a super command-line combination. But there can be certain issues with the key bindings with vim. Since moving to tmux I’ve avoided using vim tabs since I couldn’t figure out the right key bindings to switch them using C-PgUp and C-PgDn when in tmux. But today with a little help on #tmux and kerneltrap I finally got things working.…

(This is one of those you-don’t-really-have-to-read-it kind of posts) I was very excited about Node Knockout. I had a great idea for an IRC bouncer + websocket based client called Ircsome using node, qooxdoo and a couple of other things. I knew that I would only get 24 hours since Sunday had higher priority events, but I believed I could get the basic app working in 24 hours. Until things went downhill from last week.…

Hi Nikhil Marathe, We have processed the evaluation for your project named Amarok and KDE UPnP Integration with KDE. Congratulations, from our data it seems that you have successfully passed the Final Evaluations. Please contact your mentor to discuss the results of your evaluation and to plan your goals and development plan for the rest of the program Greetings, The Google Open Source Programs Team Yay! Posted via email from nikhil's posterous …

Pardon me for the excessively cliche title, I was short on time :P Its been a week now since college began, and already I feel the extreme busy-ness that occurs trying to squeeze every activity into 24 hours. The vacations were comparatively totally empty. The UPnP collection support in Amarok is concluding pretty well. Today I committed the fix that considerably shortens the amount of data transfer required over the network for subsequent queries once the local cache is relatively filled.…