FlickrExport (Linux) Update

Couple of bugs fixed(how come there were only so few of them ?).
The latest version from the SVN supports export of the digikam tags along with the extra tags given in the plugin window.
The “Annoying Popup” displaying username on each instantiation of the plugin is now removed. User name is displayed at the bottom of the window in a box called “User Details”, can be easily changed from there.

Hope Digikam + Flickr lovers enjoy the plugin. ( I am not sure if any other application user find it interesting too.)

Very soon the photoset support would be in too!

Presentations in Latex

Been lacking technical articles on the blog, Well some are gonna follow now. The current post focuses on making a presentation in Latex.

Why?
Because Latex allows you to write the equations the way they should be and displays them the best. Besides the funda of Open Format (no strings) etc is upon you to decide

How?
I have seen two alternatives for making presentation in latex,

1. Prosper
2. Beamer

both of them are very similar and requires little effort for installation.
Installation: Prosper and Beamer are available on net for download. Just download the tar file.
Beamer
1) You will also need to download the packages pgf and xcolor which are available in the above beamer link too. On untarring (tar -xvzf file.tar.gz) you get directories say beamer, pgf and xcolor.
2) Move the directory to the path /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex. or try reading this link for more ways.
3) After this just need to run the command texhash and you are done.

Prosper
Installation is much more simple. You can just add the path to directory proper into the $TEXINPUTS variable. by say export TEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS:/path/to/prosperdir

Actuall PDF making
Beamer.
A sample presentation tex file is as simple as this one.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Malmoe}
\title{ Example of a beamer presentation}
\author{ Vardhman Jain}
\institute{International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad}
\date{26 May, 2006}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{Example of beamer}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile1.eps}
\pause
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile2.eps}
\end{center}
\end{frame}

The example illustrates the use of transition the pause command will hold the display until a key is pressed. So the points can be made to come one by one. Every frame block becomes one slide.

Prosper
Prosper, gives a much simple output. To make another pdf

\documentclass[pdf,default,slideColor,colorBG]{prosper}

\title{ Example of Beamer}
\author{ Vardhman Jain }

\DefaultTransition{Wipe}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\begin{slide}{Examples}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=4in]{filename1.eps}
\end{center}
\end{slide}

Compilation:
Normally presentation classes need to be compiled to pdf before you can view it. xdvi can’t show the output properly. So you need to give commands
latex file
dvipdf file
you can actualy view the resulting file using xpdf or acroread.

Would like to thank Paresh for introduction to these presentation classes of latex.

Linux Gaining grounds in India?

There was a post/story I read on rediff.com yesterday (via Google news of course) titled ¨Linux is a big Hit In India". The post got slashdoted today. The story does bring some interesting information about some heavy deployment of Linux in India.

The interesting news was that India's largest Insurance company, LIC(Life Insurance Corporation of India) sealed a deal with Red Hat to use its desktop and server software.

Besides this a small list of big enterprises using Linux already was provided in the post: IDBI Bank, Canara Bank, New India Assurance, LIC, BSNL, IRCTC, ABN Amro, Airtel and even the governments of Maharashtra and West Bengal. 
Another such list is maintained at http://shakthimaan.com/misc/database.html

I am sure Linux does have long way to go ahead in terms of Desktop adaption in the country. But the news like this will surely help dispell some FUD created by big enterprises against Linux. More important would be some ISV coming up with software on Linux. Budding Indian enterpreneurs can definitely try looking at this option now where they can directly compete with others who are also in the starting stage of understanding/exploring software development for Linux.

Bar Camp Hyderabad: Apr, 2006

The first ever Barcamp in Hyderabad turned out to be huge success. The number of ppl attending (participating ? ) went to be over 200. IIIT Hyderabad was fortunately able to uphold the sudden increase in number of registrants. Great organization by Ramesh, Rajan, Rajat, Sunil, Tarun and many others.

Coming to the content part. I was surprized to see the amount of information flow that happened during the presentations. Many ppl in the industry are amazing too was my conclusion, really. There were presentations by Ramesh and Jay from Pramati which gave a broad overview of Web 2.0 and opportunities in the space respectively.

There was a presentation by Rajan on how attention rather than information is the new thing to focus in Web 2.0, Pramati guys spoke about XForm which I only heard of earlier, the presentation was really informative.

The Cordsys guys then spoke about the whole overview of limitation of HTML, then introducing XForm based artichitecture and gave a wonderful demo of their product which is like a nice GUI designer toolkit running over web browser.

Prof. Kamal from IIIT spoke about the MeraSystem project. Which he explained wonderfully well and removed lots of confussion I had about the whole WebOS thing. The main focus of the webOS is on centralizing data and not processing alone as is mostly interpretted.

Sumeet from Yahoo then spoke about Yahoo UI libraries, and a lot more about interesting use of some popular opensource products at yahoo and Yahoo’s Contribution back to community. Pretty interesting to know that they use MySql for some of their heavy backends and Php quite extensively. New terms like JSON, Serealized PHP and others also popped up.

Kiran from Pramati spoke about the Eclipse in the Web 2.0 space and Usability impact. Sometime in middle there was talk by Sharad Solanki on the Tangible User Interface and Web 2.0 interface, pretty interesting comparision and conclusions to take home.

Kiran from Pramati spoke about the Eclipse in the Web 2.0 space and Usability impact. Sometime in middle there was talk by Sharad Solanki on the Tangible User Interface and Web 2.0 interface, pretty interesting comparision and conclusions to take home.
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FlickrExport Gets better

Has been long since I updated the app(in fact a plugin). Today when I wanted to upload photos to flickr again and I decided to first improve the app. (Isn't it nice, you can change the app you want to use , well thats why opensource rocks)

Since Most reader don't know what I am talking about. I wrote and maintain a simple plugin for Uploading photos from Digikam (and some other KDE image viewers etc). Digikam FYKI is a powerful image management application for *nix. Do try it out if you like to play with images.

Some one else also requested this functionaly to directly upload the selection of image in the host application like Digikam, Kimdaba or gwenView. This is of course useful since you can use the best selection etc functionality of you app and then directly upload them rather than using the limited File Selection dialog of KIPI.