Bye bye 2007, you rocked!!

The year 2007 got really incredible. Perhaps i never had a year so packed with fun and achievements.

The fun began right from the start. January, went to Dang as a coordinator for setting up the first LTSP based e-Library of Nepal. The same deployment brought a chain of LTSP installations in Nepal.

A month later, won the LOCUS Open Software Competition with Shishir. Also won third prize on LOCUS Paper presentation Competition with Ayush. Few months later also made it to finals in the CHC60 Competition organized by IEEE. Sad that we didnt win, but atleast making it to finals in IEEE Competition is a pretty impressive thing. ;)

Few months after that starting working for Flash Project of Department of Education as Lead Developer. Also traveled to Pokhara, Nepalgunj and Bardia for training sessions of the same. Got a nice paycheck too -> new laptop!

FOSS stuffs got nicer too.. We celebrated the Software Freedom Day 2007. I was in Public Relation and Documentation team. The final report i wrote/compiled got us the Best Event Award. By the way it's not fair to say that we won just bcoz of the report, as the event was incredible in the first place. We had such level of extravaganza in 2006's SFD too, but we didnt win due to lack of proper documentation. This year i'm proud to be a part of the award..

Talkin about FOSS, i also started volunteering at Kantipur FM on behalf of FOSS. The program is Cybertime airs every saturday, 8:30-9am. I prepare and anchor FOSS related report and news everyweek.

College life was cool too. Forth year, so not much headachie techie classes and lots of off classes. Actually it's not nice from academic point of view, but still was a relief after three years of rigorous techie studies. And it's always fun to go to canteen n having tea with frens.

Also went to Ghorepani hiking with college frens, which itself is one of the most memorable thing that has happened this year.

And the most important of all, i started blogging. Aint still a regular blogger, but atleast i do. And seems like it counts.

Well, there are some bad moments too, but why repent over?

Dear year 2007, you've been really nice to me. Dear Life, plz be like this year for the rest of you.. ;)

Getting rebellious against M$

Devils_r_here, originally uploaded by mailzico.

My fren and active foss-nepal group member Zico and his squad from Bangladesh have gone quite rebellious. They wore a (debian) linux t-shirt, went to a M$ event and stayed there whole day long. Have a look http://www.flickr.com/photos/mohibsshot/

He told me that the M$ guys were askin them why do they prefer open-source? What's the bug in Vista?

C'mon we all know Vista IS the bug!

== UPDATE ==
I'd also posted this thing in FOSS-Nepal google groups, and the thread got really heated. Infact i'd asked Zico before posting as it was sure to be flamed but he said okay ;)

LTSP Training of Trainers

LTSP Training of Trainers started today at Kathmandu Engineering College, Kalimati. It's a two day training jointly organized by FOSS Nepal Community and Help Nepal Network. First day is about Linux, second day is about LTSP.

The trainers and the gonna-be-trainers

Update:
Prabin has uploaded the photos of TOT here.

Compact GNOME buttons and menus

If you are GNOME user, you'd agree to me on the fact that GNOME buttons and menus take too much space. While this looks cleaner and spacey, some might feel this the waste of space. Atleast i do. So why not fix it?

1. Go to /usr/share/themes (or, /home/you/.themes
   
2. Find the folder of your current theme (eg, Human, Tango, etc)
3. Inside the folder, there's a folder called gtk-2.0 and inside it a file named gtkrc
4. Open gtkrc with your text editor (ofcourse, make a backup first)
5. Search for every xthickness and ythickness in the file and set the value to 1
6. Save the file and restart X

There's also a theme named 'Clearlooks Compact' having similar attributes. You can find it here.

Furthermore, if you need more space, you can turn off text display on icons.

1. System > Preferences > Appearance > Interface tab (or, System > Preferences > Interface)
2. Set the 'Toolbar button labels' to 'Icons only'

Geeky desktop with conky

Conky's man page says,

Conky is a system monitor for X originally based on the torsmo code. Since it's original conception, Conky has changed a fair bit from it's predecessor. Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in it's own window. Conky has many built-in objects, as well as the ability to execute programs and scripts, then display the output from stdout.

Apart from system variables, I've configured conky to display fortune cookie and random jokes from jokes4all.net (via RSS). Wrote a program to display RSS data in plane text. You can find it here. It's in php.

My ~/.conkyrc file is here.

My desktop looks like this..