Category Archives: Blog

GNOME Asia 2011

Just a quick (and late!) heads-up for all of you who missed it — the GNOME Asia Summit 2011 is happening in Bangalore this week, with a bunch of really cool people doing hackfests through the week, and whole bunch of talks on Saturday and Sunday (April 2nd and 3rd). I’ll be presenting a talk [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

George Orwell on literature and intellectual honesty

If you find yourself saying tl;dr very often, you should probably stop reading now. Madhu, being the awesome cousin that she is, sent me Books v. Cigarettes, a while ago. It’s an anthology of assorted George Orwell articles and musings, amongst which is The Prevention Of Literature — a powerful essay about the function of [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

GNOME3 Power Settings

Richard Hughes recently posted about the recent GNOME3 Power Settings design that got a lot of people (myself included) hot and bothered. As I said in my comment, I think that a lot of people prefer that their laptop stay on when the lid is closed. There are clearly other who, like myself, would prefer [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , | 24 Comments

A Bibliophile’s Review of the Amazon Kindle

When it comes to books I’m really old school. Starting from the pleasure of discovering a book you’ve been dying to find, nestled between two otherwise forgettable books in the store, to the crinkling goodness of a new book, the reflexive care to not damage the spine unduly, inscriptions from decades past in second-hand books, [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Updates from the Rygel + DLNA world

Things have been awfully quiet since Zeeshan’s posted about the work we’ve been doing on DLNA support in Rygel. Since I’ve released GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0, I thought this is a good time to explain what we’ve been up to. This is also a sort of expansion of my Lightning Talk from GUADEC, since 5 minutes [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

GUADEC 2010 :(

Hopefully that title was provocative enough. ;) No, GUADEC seemed to be a smashing success. If only I had been able to attend instead of lying in bed for 2 days, ill and wondering at the general malignancy of a Universe that would do this to me. Nevertheless, I had a great time meeting all [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Site moved to Linode

I finally got tired of how slow NearlyFreeSpeech.net is (it’s still a fantastically affordable service – you get what you pay for and more), and moved to a Linode. Setup and migration was dead simple, and I’m really happy with the instance I’m on (and extremely happy about their awesome service). Do feel free to [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Pure EFI Linux Boot on Macbooks

My company was really kind to get me a Macbook Pro (the 13.3-inch “5.5″ variant). It is an awesome piece of hardware! (especially after my own PoS HP laptop I’ve been cussing at for a while now) That said, I still don’t like the idea of running a proprietary operating system on it (as beautiful [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , , | 25 Comments

FOSSKriti ’10 \o/

Three days left to the event I helped start 3 years ago. That’s right, folks, FOSSKriti ’10 is here! We started this event in 2008 because there was a huge gap between the open source world and academia in India. The aim was to expose enthusiastic students to what the F/OSS world has to offer, [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

(Gst)Discovering Vala

My exploits at Collabora Multimedia currently involve a brief detour into hacking on Rygel, specifically improving the DLNA profile name guessing. We wanted to use Edward‘s work on GstDiscoverer work, and Rygel is written in Vala, so the first thing to do was write Vala bindings for GstDiscoverer. This turned out to be somewhat easier [...]

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment