Localization Hackathon for Women on CFD (20 May)

Women in Free Software India is organizing an online Localization Hackathon for women on Monday 20 May 2013 that is Cultural Freedom Day. Our goal is to include more women in Free and Open Source Software.This event will be good for anyone new or not yet aware of FOSS and it doesn’t require any programming experience. Please join us from 8pm to 9pm tomorrow at #wfs-india channel on http://webchat.freenode.net/ to participate.

Here’s a cool introduction page for the event which you may share along with the poster – http://wfs-india.github.io/

Online event for women in India on Cultural Freedom Day

Finally, things are taking shape. We got a very few but dedicated people interested to promote FOSS among women in India. After the first two meetings we decided to have this online event where

• we will have an online digital art competition
• a Mediawiki hackathon
• an event on localization.

Everything is in planning stage right now. But we want to make FOSS attractive for girls/women in India to first use it and then contribute to it. When they hear about this event or attend it, they should feel – yeah, it’s cool – I want to do this.

Have to plan some cool promotional materials for it.

There’s one big obstacle though. People, especially women in India think of FOSS as something “geeky” – not to be touched by everyone. That it is not easy to use.

If we do not address these myths, they will continue using third grade proprietary software without even trying any other alternative!

Please share your ideas/suggestions on how to make this event interesting and appealing to women in India.

In case you want to help, please join http://wfs-india.dreamwidth.org/ an participate in the irc meetings.

2nd meeting of wfs-india to promote FOSS among women in India

We will be having our second meeting on Tuesday 7 May at 9pm IST at #wfs-india channel on irc.freenode.net.

The agenda includes -

• make plans for an event
• divide the tasks among ourselves

Please join us if you are interested.

The minutes of the first meeting is at – http://wfs-india.dreamwidth.org/832.html

Minutes of the first planning meeting to promote FOSS among women in India

The minutes of the first meeting to promote FOSS among women in India held on Monday 29 April 2013 at channel #wfs-india at irc.freenode.net is as follows –

We created a community at http://wfs-india.dreamwidth.org/. Please join if you are interested.

Regarding creating a new group for the cause, we noted that although there exist quite a few eg linuxchix, ubuntu women etc, some of the participants pointed out that – “one single non domain specific group sounds a better idea”, “would it not benefit if there is a group which is not confined to any specific agenda, such as linux or ubuntu”

We decided to hold promotional events in schools/colleges and for working women. We need to collaborate with other groups to organize such events.
We can have install fests, show videos, interview clips, share information about the culture in FOSS, the philosophy behind it and of course how it can help someone if she contributes to it.

A lot of interesting ideas came up -
- hosting hacker schools, organize hackathons, conferences
- having weekly gatherings and hacker spaces
- creating e-books, articles, art-works, graphic novels to attract more people and especially women into FOSS.
Such online efforts would help those women who can not come to events.
- creating a magazine covering successful women contributors in India – since there’s lack of role models in India.

The next agenda may include -
– how to organise events?
– how to get money?
– how to get volunteers?
– content of the event

We will be having our next meeting pretty soon. Please keep an eye on the link shared above.

IRC planning meeting to promote FOSS among women in India

Who should join?
If you are enthusiastic about FOSS and sometimes/always wondering why there are so few women in India contributing/working in FOSS, please do join. People in the meeting would love to hear your ideas and suggestions to include more women in FOSS
If you are a woman and think that women in software should come together to address the common issues faced by them, please do join.

What is the agenda?
None decided. This is our first meeting and we will share our views and see what can be done. Roughly the discussion might be around -

• why and if at all do we need a group to promote FOSS among women in India,
• how we can improve networking among women in software in India,
• how we can unite to address common issues faced by women in technology in India,
• how we can help each other to build skills, expertise and grow professionally and personally
• if we can organize an event (something on the line of adacamp – (I really love the idea)) in India.
• anything that you wish to bring up to help the cause.

When and where is the meeting taking place?
When – Monday 29 April 2013 at 9pm IST (UTC+05:30)
Where – #wfs-india at irc.freenode.net

A list of similar groups/events happening worldwide
The Ada Initiative
GRACE HOPPER
Girls in Tech London
and many more …

Last month of OPW internship

More than 2 months have passed since I started working on GeoIP server and client libraries. The libraries are now ready to use. They provide IP address based Geolocation information.

To use the client library, all you have to do is – create a GeocodeIpclient object and perform a search for Geolocation information. The search function has both synchronous and asynchronous versions –

void geocode_ipclient_search_async  (GeocodeIpclient       *ipclient,
                                     GCancellable          *cancellable,
                                     GAsyncReadyCallback    callback,
                                     gpointer               user_data);

char *geocode_ipclient_search (GeocodeIpclient *ipclient,
                               GError          **error);

To have a better look at how to call these functions visit test-geoip.c

Since we do not have a web service yet, you have to run the GeoIP server at your localhost before you use the client to query for geolocation.

Last week, I’ve added support to update Maxmind city and country databases. Since IP addresses are reassigned, the databases need to be updated. If they are not updated, they loose about 1.5% accuracy each month.

Maxmind update their databases on first Tuesday of every month. So all you need to do is to run the updater (we call it geoip-update) from a cron job. That way you don’t have to worry about downloading the databases manually.
If you are interested to know how accurate the Geolocation data is then visit this link

If you use the Geocode GeoIP libraries now, you will see that the geolocation information based on IP is not as accurate as your google map shows in your smart phone or firefox shows if you enable location sharing from it. That’s because they use a lot of other information e.g. WiFi access point data, cell tower ids etc. to provide you a very accurate location.

The next task that I am working upon now is to increase accuracy of GeoLocation information provided by Geocode GeoIP libraries.

Git is God – what to do if you’ve deleted a commit

You can accidentally delete a commit in many ways – yeah! that’s pretty easy – you just have to do one thing – not pay attention to what you are doing! And boom! you’ve deleted a commit.

In my case, I was rewriting my local commit history before sending a patch. I was using -

git rebase -i

I needed to delete an unnecessary commit but I accidentally deleted the commit on which I was working upon. That was a tight spot. I had 2 files full of changes!
So, now let me enlighten you on the power of Git.
You do a –

git fsck --lost-found

It will show a list of commit ids. In my case I had the commit id (by scrolling upward in the terminal) and it was there in that list of commit ids.
To be sure if that’s the correct commit, you can check it using –

git show 

Then I did –

git cherry-pick <commit_id>

I had multiple such dangling commits. Hence I used cherry-pick. You can get back your work through a lot of other ways – e.g. by using –

git rebase <commit_id>

or

git merge <commit_id>