The Innovation Lover

Last week I had been to Toc H Institute of Science & Technology, to address the Computer science and Engineering students. It was a nice experience to share some bits and bytes about Free and Open Source Software development to the students assembled there.

I was being invited to the college being a Google Summer of Coder 2009 to share about my experience on FOSS and how to get started. I spoke to the students about how I started using the Revolution OS ‘GNU/Linux’, how does the community work and all. The students were very new to the GNU/Linux and they hadn’t been exposed to any GNU/Linux technology stuff before. They were really enthusiastic and excited hearing about it. After my talk on how to get started working with open source projects and how it benefits them, they shot me with numerous questions. They were really enthusiastic about it. After the formal session, we had another one hour question and answers session around the auditorium.

I never had seen this much of questions from any of my audiences before. I felt very glad about it. Felt like a mass transformation would happen around TocH students to GNU/Linux. After the session I had been in conversation with the Jayakumar sir, The head of the Department, Computer Science and Engineering. He told that they were trying to build a FOSS cell around TocH and transforming atleast the computer science labs to GNU/Linux.

It was really nice experience to inspire students to Free Software.

Today I was filtering out junk CD roms aka e-waste at home. I found a lot of GNU/Linux distro CDs and thought of doing this. Have fun!

It recalls me those days bitten by Linux bug !

From life.blog

From life.blog

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These days I am enjoying vaccation and along with it, I am planning my Pardus Google Summer of Code Project on ‘Web based custom distro creator’.

I have designed some prototype for the UI design for Pardusman distro creator. Have a look and comment.

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I frequently use Google for finding several definitions. It feels always painful to run browser every time to grab some definitions. Being a terminal lover, I always wanted to do it on commandline. I wrote a few lines of python code, and its done.

I love this utility.
Cheers !

#!/usr/bin/env python
import urllib2,re,sys
 
def usage():
	if sys.argv.__len__() is not 2:
		print "usage: define < word >\n"
	else:
 
		txt = define(sys.argv[1])
		if txt is not None:
        		print '\n\033[31mDefinition of ' + sys.argv[1].upper() + ':\033[0m\n'+ txt+ '\033[0m\n'
		else:
        		print "\nNo definition found\n"
 
def define(str):
	opener = urllib2.build_opener()
	opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'define grabber by t3rm1n4l')]
        try:
 
		txt=opener.open('http://www.google.com/search?q=define:'+ str)
        	txt=txt.read()
        	regex = re.compile("<li>[a-zA-Z,. ]*\.\.\.")
        	obj = regex.findall(txt)
        	return obj[0][4:]
 	except:
		pass
usage()

UPDATE: toolz suggested me that it would be nice to print all the definitions avaliable.

So I have updated the script with more options

get it here

Google is playing more with User-agent strings. You won’t find same search results for different User-agent strings :). That’s fun.