As a speaker @ MES

I was introduced to Sooraj Kenoth by Jain while attending DevCamp at VAST. I got an invitation from him to join the DevCamp2 conducted by SMC, ZYXTechnologies and fosscell@MES Engineering College.
I was a speaker in
1) Insignia @ GEC, Thrissur, Introduction to Audacity and Avidemux.
2) Extrico – Open House @ GEC , Thrissur, A hands-on workshop on Scilab and KStars.
3) Freezone – Freesoftware in Education @ GEC ,Thrissur, Scilab in Engineering.
and today I went to MES with Sreelakshmy and delivered a session on Introduction to basic tools like indent, diff, patch and basics of git there.I never expected I could give a session on free software especially outside the college. But I was comfortable to handle the session maybe because of that the no. of participants was only about 15.Demonstrations by Mr Baiju , Mr Sooraj were interesting. The participants were very active and we formed a friendly group over there. I demonstrated Scilab for a few ECE students I met there during lunch break . Thanks to Sooraj for giving me such an opportunity to be a part of such a friendly meet.

Hands on — Shell Programming

Fosscell of our department conducted a hands on workshop on shell programming. It is quite usual to have a one day Introduction to FOSS for first year students.This time the idea of hands on workshop instead of usual talks was put forward. Congrats to Jain for this suggestion and to all those who together made it a memorable one.Though, it is more time consuming, the enthusiasm of the students to participate itself reveals that it is a more effective way. The audience really had the spirit and it was a fun to help them out.

Robotics Club

Robotics Club inaugurated on 15/11/10 at GEC, Thrissur. We had a session by Prof. Sreekanth on Introduction to Robotics and Serpentine Robots, which was his research topic. I liked his definition “Robotics is the ultimate form of performing Engineering”. Though it is late, it is really nice to have a robotics club in college. Hope this give more exposure to the students who are interested in this field.

Video download

Today one of my friend complained that you tube video downloads are difficult in GNU/Linux systems. I personally like Mozilla Firefox’s add-on ‘UnPlug’ than youtube-dl which provides a command line interface.
Open Firefox->Tools->Add-ons
Search for UnPlug and install it to download videofiles without streaming them.
Open the video file, click Tools->UnPlug , click download.

BSNL 3g and broadband conflicts eachother

Recently I got a bsnl 3g net setter and installed Join_Air to access it in ubuntu10.04(lucid). We can connect bsnl 3g or 2g with these configurations but bsnl broadband will fail to connect. To use bsnl broadband, backup the file /etc/ppp/options and delete it. You can connect bsnl net setter later on by restoring the file.

Foss in Education

One of the memorable event on life was to be in stage at 10th september 2010 at Tagore Hall , Calicut while RMS delivering his speech.I was accompanied by my friends Sneha , Farzin and Rahul. Me and Sneha were at NIT Campus for next two days attending National Conference on Free Software in Education.
Event started with an introduction to free software.In next few sessions discussions were on how free software helps in education and the necessity to see the masters code. The talks dealt with issues like vendor locking in softwares , which hinder education .
The afternoon sessions demonstrated the free software applications in education.The idea of studios instead of class rooms presented by Nagarjuna sir was interesting and such methodologies will surely make education systems more efficient.My first talk on free software was about audacity and I had a luck to hear the session on it directly from Juan Carlos(#experience).
For the first time in my life,I got an opportunity to see ‘kalaripayattu’ a traditional martial art of Kerala.
There was a session on Scilab, SAGE, Python by Prabhu Ramachandran sir, which I enjoyed a lot may be because he discussed something familiar to me. The sessions gave introduction to free software application which aids Engineering Education like Turtle Graphics,GRASS, QUCS ,KTechlab etc which are really helpful.The session by Krishnakant sir was really inspiring.
The idea of studio based education was later demonstrated using sugar labs and was an awesome session. It really reveals the necessity to change the education system and I felt that there should be more authorities also over there to hear it.We attended a session by National Mission on Education through ICT which opened up a great collection of resources to ponder.
All together the sessions was really nice and I should thank Prof.Sasi ,Prof.Mohandas, coordinators and volunteers for giving us such a great opportunity.

Migrating to Ubuntu,net connection

1) If you are having a broadband connection,please follow instructions on http://aswinatgec.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/connect-to-internet-in-ubuntu-804-a-simple-guide-to-windows-users
2)If you are using a mobile broadband, follow the instructions on http://sruthidevi.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/settingup-mobilebroadbandairceldocomo-in-ubuntu9-10-karmic-koala/
3)If you are using a net-setter or you are not able to configure your device with Network manager, you can use wvdial

Plug in and connect your device to PC
$sudo apt-get install wvdial
$sudo apt-get install pppd
$sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf
This will genarate configuration file with information about your modem
$sudo vi /etc/wvdial.conf

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
; Phone =
ISDN = 0
; Password =
New PPPD = yes
; Username =
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800

This is a sample of file genarated.Remove semicolon from lines Phone,Password,Username and fill in the details.Save your changes and exit from the editor
Run wvdial
Disconnect by pressing Ctrl+C

Migrating to ubuntu,re-installing grub

I am so happy because many of my friends are migrating to Ubuntu now a days.There are so many links over net to re-install grub.Any way I am just listing the steps to do it.
1) Boot from livecd.
2) $sudo fdisk -l
This displays your partition table
3) $sudo mkdir /media/root
4) $sudo mount /dev/sdaX /media/root
sdaX is your linux partition,replace X with number corresponds to it which u can obtain from partition table
5) $sudo mount /dev/sdaX /media/root/boot
6) $sudo grub-install –root-directory=/media/root /dev/sda
You should get the output “Installation Complete,No errors reported”
7) Reboot and update grub.

This is the shortcut method.Please visit https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 , http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub-2.html to know about Grub2 and re-installation.

Robotics Workshop

Today, the two day robotics workshop ended successfully.The workshop was conducted in CCF at GEC,Thrissur by Li2-innovations (www.li2-innovations.com) on behalf of the placement cell of the college.
I am extremely happy to write a post on this event because I was the student coordinator of the event.It was not a huge event. Just fourteen groups and that is 42 students.But I am happy about it because it is the first event that I am coordinating. How I became the coordinator is the funny part.In February,one of my friends told me that this workshop will be conducted on Nehru Engineering College and I decided to attend it.But the workshop dates clashed with my exam dates and I quit the idea. I called a friend to know the next venue of the workshop and got the contact details of Bharat (coordinator of workshops in colleges of Kerala,I suppose). He contacted me and told that if I could coordinate the event, they like to conduct it in our college.I decided to try it because if I am supposed to goto some other college to attend the workshop, I need to bother about my and my friend,s accommodation any such issues.Later,I contacted Jayanand Sir (Placement Cell Officer) and started the works, not going in to details.It includes stuffs like publishing posters, getting permissions, publicising among students, collecting fees and so on.
We postponed the event from 26th and 27th June to 3rd and 4th July and I had to redo all the works. We had the groups ready, and then I met Rinson ,my senior who had contacts with Raghav of Li2-innovations.Jayanand Sir played a key role to make the program a success. It was a very nice experience to see the students actively participating in the event. I am too happy now as I got responses from students who attended it that they liked the event and will surely participate such events in future also.

As a beginner to the field of robotics, I liked the event a lot. Raghav gave an introduction about anatomy of robots, micro controllers,programming stuff,building line follower robots etc and we started followed by Saketh’s sessions on line follower robots. In the following sessions we built clap sensor robots and all the other five.The sumo competing robotic session was really a fun.

The unforgettable part of the event is that it started at 10.45am where it was supposed to be started at 9.00am yesterday.Bharat told me that he is not coming for the workshop and I didn’t had direct contact with Raghav who is supposed to come at that time.Infact it was the mistake of Indian Railways. But, it was a bit difficult to make all participants wait for one and a half hours but most of the partcipants(almost 11 groups) was my friends itself.
Anyhow I am so happy that the event was useful to the participants and it was a fun filled environment. I forgot to mention my group members Rincen and Shibin, both were very friendly, cooperating and the hacking session together with them was marvellous.

I should thank Pramode Sir also for motivating me to go ahead.I like to thank members of Li2-innovations,Jayanand Sir, participants and all my friends who helped me to have such a nice experience.

Installing Canon PIXMA iP1200 on Ubuntu9.10

Drivers for this printer are not available. Following the instructions to install the device on Hardy I encountered some errors and fixing them makes it work fine.Try this code initially

$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
Add the following lines
deb http://mambo.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~takushi/ubuntu ./
deb-src http://mambo.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~takushi/ubuntu ./
and save it.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libcnbj-2.6 bjfilter-2.6 pstocanonbj

If this work fine, goto System->Administration->Printing
New Printer
Follow on-screen instructions ,authenticate with username: root and password: your root password ,choose Canon iP2200 Ver.2.60 as your driver. Print your test page.
You can accomplish the same at http://127.0.0.1:631/ also

The error I encountered is pstocanonbj: Depends: libcupsys2 (>= 1.2.3)
If you got a similar error then run
$ sudo apt-get install libcups2-dev
If it works fine then goto instruction for building pstocanonbj .

If you get following output instead
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = “en_US.UTF-8″
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale (“C”).
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
run the following code to fix it.
# locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8 hu_HU hu_HU.UTF-8
# dpkg-reconfigure locales
This will fix the issue and run sudo apt-get install libcups2-dev

Now,we should build pstocanobj from source
$ sudo aptitude install dpkg-dev
$ sudo apt-get source pstocanonbj
$ cd pstocanonbj-3.3/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo cp /usr/local/lib/cups/filter/pstocanonbj /usr/lib/cups/filter/


If this work fine, goto System->Administration->Printing
New Printer
Follow on-screen instructions ,authenticate with username: root and password: your root password ,choose Canon iP2200 Ver.2.60 as your driver. Print your test page.