Shiretoko Shock in India - Firefox 3.5 is coming!

Hello folks!

With the release of Firefox 3.5 tomorrow, the wonderful Mozilla community has come up "Shiretoko Shock"; A campaign to set-off fireworks worldwide to celebrate. We'd light up the night country by country, town by town, to show the world just how amazing Firefox is. But, there is a little difference..They are going to make a big bang by spreading Firefox with Social Media like twitter, Orkut, Facebook, etc. And, we need your help!

Read http://www.spreadfirefox.com/shiretokoshock-campaign for how you can help.. But, I'm writing this blog post for posting timings of shocks in India..

Shiretoko shock begins at 30th June Tuesday in Brazil at 3:50PM BST. This shock is first of many shocks to follow worldwide. So, as shocks trigger moving in west direction; regional Shiretoko shock in India will be on 1st July at 3:50 PM IST.

As shocks shatter earth one timezone after another with news about release of Firefox 3.5, it would reach Brazil after 24 hours after its start..

This is the time for a "Super-Shock", the biggie one.. Because, all of us will join in to celebrate at precisely the same time. No matter what time it is in India, at 3:50 PM (BST) on Wednesday, July 1st, we'll all go post crazy: tweeting, blogging, facebooking, and more!

So, super-shock in India is going to be on 2nd July Thursday at 12:20 AM..

See you on highway to OpenWeb..

PS:
1] Check this out http://barcamp.org/MozCampMumbai <- Release celebration of Firefox 3.5 in Mumbai 2] Fixed time world clock

Celebrate Holi with Foxkeh..

Holi, the festival of colours is just days away. Holi is celebrated all over India to denote beginning of Spring season.


If you love Firefox and want to spread some Firefox love, the Mozilla community and CampusReps have came up with a great e-card which you can send to your friends and relatives for free.. Isnt it great? Go to http://www.brinkhurstdesign.co.uk/mozilla/ to send ecard.

The cute fox you see on e-card is a cute mascot from Japan who has charmed people worldwide. He is named Foxkeh.

Happy Holi!

Lenny is here!

Finally after 22 months of development, Rock Solid[TM] Debian 5.0 codenamed "Lenny" is released yesterday! Awesome valentines gift from Debian community..


Read release notes here and download Debian from here.

If you want to use Debian and you are in and around Mumbai but are not able to download it, let me know I'll make it available for you at just cost of blank cd/dvd's..

Image credit: Raphael's Blog

Celebrate Valentines Day!

Valentines Day is just couple of days away. Everyone of you must be thinking what to gift your loved one. Here's a nice gift idea, you can use..

Visit http://tinyurl.com/14febgift and yes its free! ;-)

Ehh.. IE Only?? No Way!

This morning just took a look at website of MBA entrance process for dates and applying online.. The initial page is fine but on clicking on applying online it says it supports IE only.. I'm not going to use IE!

I was wondering how do I temporarily change User Agent in Firefox to that of IE. Yes its pretty easy to do so in "about:config" window in Firefox. Just filter entries with term "useragent" and edit entries accordingly.

Now, this would be boring for some and also for me. Then search AMO for any such extension and voila got one! :-)

"User Agent Switcher" is a extension which just changes user agent of Firefox without even a restarting Firefox. You can change User agent from Tools > User Agent Switcher > .

In my case, I chose Internet Explorer 7 and so I can now access website as it thinks that I'm using IE. :-D

Merry Christmas!

Wishing you all a happy holiday and also a great new year ahead..
I use VLC media player for watching videos and some days back I noticed change in its icon. It has a santa hat on its logo! This is only seen on VLC's version 0.9 and higher.

Check out the screenshots, but better try it yourself. Thanks to VLC team for such a great media player..

Notice the icon on upper left corner

Post FOSS.IN/2008..

I should have been blogging this weeks back as soon as FOSS.IN/2008 was over, but it didnt happen. :-( Had to keep up with college work..

This year I was a volunteering! It was truly a great experience and for me a chance to work with a awesome team.

Anyways, I've uploaded the pics(flicks) on Flickr.

Did I say a video earlier? Yeah, it is captured during concluding part of KDE Project of The Day. Adriaan de Groot singing the KDE song titled "We're KDE!" and dancing along are KDE developers from India Shashank, Sharan, Pradeepto, Piyush, many more enjoying in the hall.. I forgot the name of person with guitar.. :-(
Please comment if someone knows it!

You can see the video on Vimeo. I uploaded it on Vimeo because you can download original video file as registered user. ;-)

Times ahead

I came back from FOSS.IN/2008 almost one week back, but didn't get enough time to blog in detail about it; reasons being I'd missed one week college!

Writing in few words, FOSS.IN/2008 was awesome! As I'd been a volunteer this time, got to work with one of the best team ever. Have a lot of experiences which I would like to share, but later..

I'm participating in a exhibition at our college. Will be giving talk on Mozilla Firefox and will try to add some more too. Problem is we(students) were told yesterday about exhibition! Lets see how this goes.. Definitely will keep posted on this. Meanwhile any suggestions/comments welcome....

Take a Mozilla survey!

Mozilla has been working hard to learn more about the technology landscape in India and has participated in a number of successful events the past couple of years to help educate people about Mozilla and Firefox. Mozilla has made a lot of progress, but want to get more people involved in our strategy in India.

Now it's time for you folks to tell us what we might have missed and to share what you know. Please take our survey at: http://moz.india.sgizmo.com (Understanding the Internet community in India) AND pass the link along to family, friends, and colleagues that can also provide Mozilla with their feedback.

Thank you for helping the Mozilla community and for sharing your knowledge with us..

Do comment if you have any queries regarding the survey!

A wise man once said!

Link : Abstruse Goose

Finally a debian talk by me!

Exams season is here for Mumbai University students. And for past entire week we had our practical exams, presentations, etc.

We have a subject "Internet Security", of course with M$ Windoze specific syllabus. And we had to give presentation on any topic related to the subject. I would never give a presentation with anything related to M$ in it..

Just had a peaceful talk with our professor, gave her idea of entire thing. Luckily, it was okay with her and I'm talking on Debian GNU/Linux..

My presentation was yesterday and it went well! :-) Feels awesome, that I got a chance to talk about Debian. I'd given a presentation about Mozilla Firefox during release of Firefox 3.

But, finally I think people loved my talk and they'll love Debian too..

Random quotes!

Came home from college(attending boring lectures) and brother gave me some 'quotes' from some book he was reading. Would like to share them.. Loved them because they are fact that everyone must know!

1] It is best to learn as we go, than to go as we have learned.

2] Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

3] I've never let my schooling interfere with my education.

4] The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The GREAT teacher inspires.

5] If you want to make peace, you don't talk with friends. You talk to your enemies.

6] When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find if it has stopped.

7] Be ashamed to die unless you've won some victory for humanity.

8] One of the greatest victory you can gain over someone is that beat him at being truthful.

9] Be careful that victory does not carry seeds of future defeats.

NIce ones, aren't they?

Happy Birthday King of Swirls!

I wish Debian project a very Happy Birthday. Its now 15 years since its first release on 16th August, 1993 and hence we can say today is Debian's 15th Birthday..



On this occasion, I planned to do some artwork in form of poster to put up besides my home desk. But today, its Raksha Bandhan and all relatives coming to our place. So, no time to do it. Instead I'll tell everyone about Debian and of course a cake for debian.

If I make any such artwork, will post it..

[TAB] in Python interpreter..

I always use bash on terminal and often find the tab-completion feature useful. Bet on it, without that, life would be horrible..

Yesterday, I and Kunal were working on some pythonic stuff. It is regarding pyslide story. We needed some kind of xmlparser in pyslide as python-xml is to be removed. I don't have any idea of what is XML and so was googling around today. While trying for some stuff with Python shell, I realized that their is no tab-completion in Python interactive shell. And it would be of great help. So bumped on this in Python Docs. While searching for proper way to do tab completion, I saw a video on dgplug tv by Kushal.

Here's what I did to get tab-completion in Python's interactive shell..

1]Create a ~/.pythonrc file with following content.

 try:
    import readline
except ImportError:
    print "Module readline not available."
else:
    import rlcompleter
    readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

2] Put the following line in ~/.bashrc file.

 export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.pythonrc

Now, everytime you start the python interactive shell, the ~/.pythonrc file is executed and HURRAY [TAB] works in Python shell.. :-)


Results:


aamod@cowbee:~$ python
Python 2.5.2a0 (r251:54863, Jan 3 2008, 17:59:56)
[GCC 4.2.3 20071123 (prerelease) (Debian 4.2.2-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.pa
os.pardir os.pathconf os.pathsep
os.path os.pathconf_names
>>> os.pa

Finally done..

Finally, I've completed the gigantic "JAVA" assignment # 1. It had 30 questions. You can say I just completed a "Complete Ref to Swing" kind of thing....

Thanks to following:-
1] my friends who believe in "co-operate to dominate".
2] bad mosquitoes who bit me throughout night and kept me awake.(coffee was not available :-( )
3] my *great* handwriting. :-)

Will write some quality stuff on blog soon.. I know this post s*cks, its CRAP.!

Firefox T-Shirts ready..

Just came back home with custom-made Firefox t-shirts everyone had ordered. There are 36 t-shirts. We printed them at Dadar. The printing has been done brilliantly.. Firefox logo has came up as it is..

Feel sorry for those whom we'd asked but they didn't order!

Got the web back!

Wanted to post this yesterday but was too tired..

We'd a blast yesterday at Firefox Download Day Party organized in our college. About 25 people in attendance including students and faculty members. My slides were prepared at last minute, but everyone liked them.
Lab was decorated with Firefox stuff.. You can see it in photos on my Flickr..

I started by giving a talk on Mozilla and Firefox. I aggressively did comparison between Firefox and other browsers. It was fun giving a talk. Later, everyone got hands on computer and we Firefox'ed every computer in sight.. Everyone contributed to download day record and yes college printer was utilized at fullest for printing the certificates..

Also, we're planning to make t-shirts of Firefox.. They'll be ready in 1-2 weeks..

Taking back the web with Firefox 3!

As I'd said in my previous post, I was planning for a Firefox download party @ viva college. It was made final by 12PM yesterday. Got permission from college officials to use college labs and other required facilities. So, yesterday, me and my friends spent entire day preparing for the party; making some posters, banners, stickers and CD's. I'd been requested by attending party'ers to give a talk on Mozilla 'n' Firefox. So here I am writing this post from college labs.. Its around 11AM and we'll be starting at around 12.30 and my slides or my sub-topics to talk on are not ready yet! Making the slides now.. Actually I came to my blog to read one of my previous post. Expecting a strength of 20-25. Let's see can't wait to start the party!

Will post all the fall-out and also my slides from our Firefox 3 release/download party later!

You may join discussion group at groups.google.com/group/fossible-in

Make a World Record!

Wanna make a world record? Its very simple. Download Firefox 3 on 17th June.
The Mozilla community is all set to make a world record for maximum number of downloads for a software in 24 hours. Oh yes! you get a certificate for it too.

Visit its site and pledge!

By that time I'm planning to arrange a download fest in our college. But, need to work again with college people.. I'll keep posting on this stuff.

75 years in making

Yesterday our family celebrated 75th birthday of my grandpa. He lives life to fullest and give me power to face happiness and sorrows in every walks of life!

I wanted to tell you all that party was at Park Club which is besides Mayor Bungalow in dadar. It has a awesome seaside view and fantastic lawn. So, if you've a party to make this is best possible place. Natural and fresh air along with soothing sound of waves in sea.