ODF Olypiad - I realized...

Recently came to know about ODF Olypiad for school kids. Interesting. Hats off to the group or person for the idea of the contest. When we introduce school kids to open source software help them participate, the reach of is tremendous. From my side I spoke to a class VII kid who had come home for vacation about the contest. She was all excited and the presentation she prepared impressed all of us in the family.
Considering
- she has never heard about the term open source before I spoke to her about contest
- she is just learning MS powerpoint and excel in school. No other programming languages so far or now.
- First time she used linux(Open suse), Open office tools

At the end of two days she wanted me to install linux in her PC!! WOW! That is the spirit. I am waiting to do it.

While helping her out with presentation, found a couple of interesting projects

• Edubuntu
• kde-educational

More about contest in this link

If you are reading this blog before Nov 15 2008 and know any school kid and you are a open source enthusiast do pass this info and help them participate. It is a great feeling to see a person getting excited about open source.

Schools in India should go for open source software. There is a huge collection of software and it is all free. Instead of spending money in software they can buy more computers so that many students get a chance to learn! I think the problem is awareness. Kids of this generation are superfast, they learn tools faster!

In the process of assisting the kid understand OSS, I realized many non computer people don't know that they have to pay for windows,ms office as pirated software is so freely available! Unfortunate!

Dokuwiki - Collaborative editing rocks

Have been using Dokuwiki at office to track productivity. Me and my team(3 including me) have been using dokuwiki to track work. We have lot of testcase runs and we put in the results and comments in dokuwiki.

Dokuwiki suited my needs more than others for following reasons:

• I didn't have any database running and didn't want to have one(backup and all is not my cup of tea). Dokuwiki manages simple txt files
  
• The company I work for has web space for us and anything we put in public_html is avaialble in our intranet backup of that space is taken care by IT department of the company.
• I wanted a authentication machanism, and revision history as well. Doku does it all well.
• I like the admin page, plugin manager part. It simply rocks!
  

Right now I am looking for ways to post to dokuwiki from script! Getting more and more interesting!

Today I learnt something new in dokuwiki after seeing a error.

Writing /home/brainnet/public_html/bsci-net-dialog00/data/cache/5/522c62dd4b6b6c68cb771e429d51639e.i failed
Unable to save cache file. Hint: disk full; file permissions; safe_mode setting.
Writing /home/brainnet/public_html/bsci-net-dialog00/data/cache/5/522c62dd4b6b6c68cb771e429d51639e.i failed
Unable to save cache file. Hint: disk full; file permissions; safe_mode setting.
Writing /home/brainnet/public_html/bsci-net-dialog00/data/cache/5/522c62dd4b6b6c68cb771e429d51639e.xhtml failed

Check out how to solve from link. Actually the tip at the end of page helped me solve the issue.

• I did a “mkdir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 a b c d e f” in data/cache and chmoded all these to 777. This seems to be a workaround, too.
  • This is not really a solution, because DokuWiki needs to create subdirectories for namespaces as well, with the above method you'll still not be able to create new namespaces
  • If you don't need new namespaces, this is a workaround!

I didn't need namespace! :)

Tried IRC

IRC is always a fuzzy word for me! Today decided to try. There was a chat client called XChat in which I tried. Setting it up was pretty simple. Followed instructions from this link. Logged into Linuxchix, It did work right away! I wanted to know if there is any program/tool that would fill web form. My idea to fill the indianrail.gov.in pnr number and check the status of tickets and send notification emails :). Just for fun! There were few very nice people in the linuxchix forum, who suggested something called spambot,eyeball. Also one more suggestion was to use perl post! Will try to know what they are and which one will suit my requirement most!

Tried Kopete

Today I went in search of a chat client in linux for google chat. I somehow always have a feeling gmail when left open in browser uses lot of bandwidth! Ajax and it keeps refreshing! So, wanted a chat client in my ubuntu,picked up kopete. Followed instruction from gtalk site but kopete didn't work right away. It showed a error saying QCA TLS missing. After installing it using the following commnd now i am chatting using kopete, and blogging this one as well!

apt-get install qca-tls

I do like ubuntu and kopete as of now!