GUADEC 2014 report

 Thanks to the sponsorship by GNOME foundation, I was able to attend GUADEC 2014 held at Strasbourg, France. It was a great experience for me as I was attending a developer conference of such kind for the first time. There was a huge attendance for the talks with both the rooms having considerable audience for each and every talk.
  There were lots of talks in the conference and the ones that really interested me were how to sustain the open source projects and more on the philosophy side. I had been late at the AGM talk and had a hard time finding a chair! It was a huge participation in that one.
   The talk by Frederico Quintara on private and public keys became interesting as he gave a demo at the same time.
   The coffee room was constantly abuzz with people talking about Gtk+ and what not! and occasionally somebody would curse out loud because they broke something instead of fixing it :D It was a great environment and a really fun one to be in!
   The best part of GUADEC 2014 was the people that I met. I had been working with many of them for about 3 years now and finally got an opportunity to meet them. That felt great! Apart from them, I got to interact with people working on different modules and got ideas of integration of GTG with their modules and such.
    Overall it was a new and exciting experience for me and something that I would love to do more often if time permits.

  Only one feedback to the organizing committee: It would have been better if the lunch venue had been closer to the conference venue.


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Bonjour GUADEC!

So right now I am in the beautiful city of Strasbourg, France surrounded by great minds of Gnome. How exciting!
This is my first GUADEC and I am here as a GSoC mentor and maintainer for Getting Things Gnome!. The talks here have been really good so far and I am looking forward to the  next 2 days of the conference.
The better part of the conference though, is not the talks that you attend but the people you get to meet. I finally met the people I had been working with for the past years and boy, It felt great!! More updates and a report of the conference will come soon :)
Thanks to Gnome Foundation for sponsoring me :)

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Solved: The "Preventing laptop from suspending on lid close Gnome" headache

    Locking your screen on closing the lid is no longer an option in Gnome. Don't you hate it? I for one have to close the lid often and I hate it when the laptop is suspended. I had to go over a lot of places for getting a solution and finally got one after lots of IRC discussions, a bug report (which I marked invalid myself ;) ) and obviously googling.

TL; DR version:
There are 2 possible solutions:
1. Changing "HandleLidSwitch=lock" in /etc/systemd/logind.conf (didn't work for me...)
2. Run this on a terminal: systemd-inhibit --what=handle-power-key:handle-suspend-key:handle-lid-switch sleep 999999. Don't put in bashrc file, I am not able to log back in my OpenSuSE 12.3 installation!!

Now, the longer version:
    The problem started when the gnome devs got frustrated with the system inhibitors preventing their laptops from suspending. In the comments, you could literally see the devs crying about this problem and fearing that their laptop batteries would soon die.
Solution: Gnome has default removed the lid switch handle and even if it is present, it ignores it by default.    This means, no matter what setting you have, the laptop would suspend on lid close. The points made by the devs will make you agree with their solution.
    I was not aware of all this discussion and hence thought the problem was with Gnome-Tweak-Tool which gives you an option to set the action on laptop lid close. Hence, reported a bug. Later on, after some Google search for alternatives I realized that the problem was not with the tool but with Gnome, but didn't know what.
    I discussed the issue at #suse irc channel but turns out they are mostly KDE users. On trying a gsettings solutions, I found an error saying that the power schema itself was missing! Then I went to the Gnome channel and luckily Florian Müllner was online the third time I posted the question. He told me that the problem was not about the power schema but about system-inhibitors and gave me a heads up for the solution. He is a really patient guy!! A little bit of Googling brought me to the above mentioned 2 solutions.
    Unfortunately the first one doesn't work for me but works for others. The second one worked for me though. The solution may have worked but I didn't want to enter the command everytime and hence I put it in my bashrc file as I never want my laptop to suspend on lid close. Turns out, I am unable to login to my OpenSuSE installation ever since I modified the bashrc file!! Will have to modify the file now :(
    I must say the Gnome experience since Gnome 3 has not been that good.

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Pulling data from launchpad repository even if SSH is not available

    All the curses that English language has to offer will not be enough to calm me when I think of my college's network administrators. You can see in their faces that whatever you request them to do, their answer is going to be NO. No matter how much I requested them, they did not allow me SSH access to outside world :(
    Here's what my problem is: I contribute to open source projects which have code on launchpad and I use bzr to manage my code. Now since SSH is blocked I am unable to pull/push (get/send) code to the launchpad server.
    At first I thought of tunneling SSH over HTTP but then I realized that it would require configuration over both Launchpad and my side. Now obviously Launchpad would not make changes to it's server just because some network administrator is harassing students. So I went over the #bzr IRC channel on freenode (for solving a doubt, first comes Google and then comes IRC). As expected I got a solution for my problem. Though the solution was a partial one as it only solved my problem of pulling data and not pushing data. Anyways, here is the solution that they suggested.
   remove 'launchpad_username' from bazaar.conf and deleting the launchpad.net section of authentication.conf This will make bzr use HTTP link. Ignore bzr telling you that you are not logged into launchpad.
   It will behoove you to keep the old versions bazaar.conf and authentication.conf as you will need the details when you push the code. Now it will be irritating to move back and forth between the 2 configuration files but hey! at least you are getting up to date code! You can of course write a shell script to do this task for you :)

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Possible problems with your django installation

In case you have installed Django using a package manager, then there are chances that you will face the following issues and the django installation pitfalls page might not help you. I faced the same and here are the solutions that worked for me.

django-admin.py not found:
The reason for this error to occur is, the directory of the file does not belong to your system path. You can either add the directory to your path or simply link your file.
How will you find the directory location?
Here's how: in your python shell enter the following commands

>>import django

>>django.__file__

Then type this in your terminal to add a link to django-admin.py:

sudo ln -s {location}/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin/django-admin.py

Another error would be with the installation of database backend:
For example, you would not be able to add mysqldb database. Probable cause for this problem is that you do not have the package 'python-mysqldb' installed.
Installing the package should solve your problem.

In case you are going to use openid or any such service, it is better to check whether the required python packages are installed.

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cenv: create your own environments

     Everytime I start coding for GTG, I have to start terminal, nautilus and a browser(in case of bugs ;) ). For a lazy person like me, this is a very boring task. Hence i just came up with an easy solution : environment creator which takes a set of your tasks and turns them into a linux command.
     With all the tasks done in just one go, I can consider it to be a productivity enhancing tool (though it's primary purpose was to help lazy bums like me :P ). All sorts of work environments can be created with this tool. You can have one called "work" which like mine, starts terminal with vim/gedit, nautilus and browser. You can keep one for home which could maybe contain nautilus with your songs folder opened up, a music player, a todo list manager if you have one etc.
     Another added advantage for this tool, is that you can create macros for yourself. Say you have a habit of backing up your files to your external device regularly, you can just create an environment called "backup" with all the copy commands. Heck, you can even add one environment inside another environment because these all are actually turned into linux commands only!
     Right now I have features like "new", "remove" , "rename", "edit" etc. but further more features will come up in a week of 2. The very basic version is ready and I plan to launch the version 0.1 by next Saturday.
     Here is the link to the homepage of the launchpad project: https://launchpad.net/cenv
     I'll let others contribute to the code after the launch of version 0.1
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How random can people think?

    Since, I have been doing some research work at college these past 2 months. I have been getting several weird ideas of surveys and testing stuff
    I first tested my laptop's performance with 100% power usage. Will share the results in the next post. Now I want to know how random can people think.
   We may think that we are selecting some random number but always there is a certain number which comes to our minds first. For example, when giving math problems to my mom's students I often selected the numbers 23 and 32. Don't know why. Also, there will be a number which is a common favorite of the mass and is bound to come often in the survey. Lets see the result.
   Here is the link to the form. You just have to enter 5 randomly chosen numbers. Don't take too long to think the random number. Just type the first 5 that come to your mind!
   https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEp0U2dfTV9VaHQxeDJQU0Zad3hqc1E6MQ

   Will share the results next week

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