growing awareness of digital freedom

Hello all,
I know you all might be wondering why such a big lul?
I have not been blogging for quite some time now and you can easily guess that it was due to the fact that there was not much to blog.
So it is equally obvious that some thing has made me take up the laptop in my hand again to break the lul.
Well, of late I have been doing a few free software workshops, including some technical seminars on Python, Django and struts.
Nothing new in that, basically I have been doing it for quite some years, both as a second profession and also to spread as much awareness about digital freedom as possible.
I almost came very near to blog a week before, I had a wonderful workshop at Vartak college Vasai.
Infact I will speak about that experience as well, but some thing or the other kept me busy.
Yesterday, on 30th August 2014, I went to deliver a talk on free software and migration to FOSS at Sarvajanic College of Engineering, Surat.  Praveen, the great free software and privacy activist and Ishan our budding GNUKhata contributer was along with me.
We had a nice journey and although could not eat Bhuging, a delicacy around virar, we had a very nice time.
Overall the response was great, enough for us to realise at the very outset that here is some place where people have basic sence and they value their digital freedom.
We reach Surat late night on 29th and had to take rest.
On the way the food was great although not outstanding from our standards.
We are proud, pure non veg freeks so had some good chicken and mutton dishes.
As I said, the sad part was that we could not have Bhuging, a conbination of poha and chicken.
So in the morning, we were escorted by Prof. Bintu and his colligue to the college.
From here on the real surprises started.
The moment we met Principle, Dr. Vaishali and the chairman representative Yagnik bhai, we knew that they have taken the free software "movement " very seriously.
I quoted the word movement because that's what they used during the talk.
It is very rare that people at the top level talk about FOSS in such a way.
Prof. Dipali Kasat, who had actually coordinated the workshop was very happy to see us there and we had a cup of tea and headed streight to the seminar hall.
We did our regular free software talk with presentation from your's truely, followed by the demo of Ubuntu based GNU/Linux desktop.
I started off by explaning them the need for digital freedom, explaining them the freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute Free Software.
Open source as they call it mostly, had already taken some roots in that college.  It was very obvious when people asked questions like "I tryed getting my printer work with Linux but there was some problem", or "I wish to know how I can configure ldab in a more secured way ".  Infact prof. Dipali wished to know if she could configure Koha, the library management free software in a more better way.
We told her that there would be more simpler and easy FOSS alternatives.
Overall participants were very happy that their queries were getting solved and we wer happy that people had value for all that they were learning.
For those who take such workshops, one thing to remember is to understand not just the kind of participants they are going to adress, but also what their institute's overall mindset is about free software.
This includes understanding how management thinks and what level of openness exists amongst faculties.
For example the Vasai workshop we did last week was totally different.
The college does not even give basic facilities like Internet to the students.
They off late seem to be realizing the need for free softwaer, although not so seriously into it.
Students in that college however, realize this and came out openly when they spoke with me and Praveen at the Varadh banglo where we both stayed during that last week's workshop.
So during my inogural talk in Vartak college, I had harshly critisized overall system and had refered to universities as mafia gangs, just to loot students.
I know some faculties got hert but students know it well that I was speaking the bitter truth.
They got so amused and impressed with my comment that a group of students started their own mailing list called pymafia@librelist.com and we have already started discussion on that list.
Really a wonderful experience that was with students like Shikha, Romali, Swarali, Reevs and many others including Bhargav who have become pretty active.

Back to my Surat experience, Well the workshop went very well with Ishan disccussing in great details about his case against HP, where they forced him to buy windows 8.1 license for one laptop he liked.
People were sensitized by him that such a thing is illegal.  Me and Praveen really liked when he said "my loyers will get them to change the terms in their agreement".
Here though I was rather on a soft tone and knew that harsher words are not needed, given the already understanding and knowledgable faculties and management.
However one has to talk firmly and in such places should make it a point to strongly back what we say.
The reason for me to blog about this though really came at the end of the seminar.
The principle Dr. Vaishali, in her closing speech said a fundamentally remarkable thing.
her statement was "India has gone freedom 68 years before, but we are still not free digitally, our knowledge and data is still in the hands of few big companies and most of them not Indian".
Praveen immediately and rightly commented to me saying, "here is one faculty who very well knows and understands the issue and not talking some formal closing crap".
We now plan to intensify the campain and get their technical problems solved as early as we can.
The library softwaer, LDAP support and setting up the center for excelence in that college is right on our agenda.
Overall the last 2 experiences of workshop have proven one thing.
In one place the students were fast becoming digital freedom activists and in the other, the entire management is well aware of the value of digital freedom.
Infact I must bring to the notice of thoes pessimist's,  that colleges like Sarvajanic college of engineering have streight way refused to buy new licenses or upgrade old once from Microsoft and other companies.
This goes to show that the awareness is fast growing and we are winning.
  

FOSS trip in Aasam

Dear readers, I have been waiting to post this great news about GNUKhata, www.gnukhata.org which is my dream project.
I was wondering how soon i would get some time to start writing.
But sitting at the Guwahati airport, the flight delay of 90 minits gave me the much needed chance to start writing this blog post.
Before you all wander what brought me here in the north east, I would like to let you all know that Amtron, the Aasam Electronic Corporation has decided to deploy GNUKhata, the free accounting software in a big way.
This deployment will be the biggest ever for GNUKhata superseeding the one we did in Kerala state.
On my way back there are quite a few things on my head and wonderful memories to carry back.

The mission

The main aim to visit Amtron was to get them started on GNUKhata so that the upcoming deployment for the said organization and a few other government departments goes smoothly.
Basically myself, and the core GNUKhata team, including our domain expert Mr. Arun Kelkar, my wife Sayali, Ujwala and Trupti, all had one goal in mind.
we had to have some cloud infrastructure setup with GNUKhata for Amtron and train people to use it with comfort.
The MD of the said organization, Mr. Yadava is a great personality.  I must say at the outset that he really won my heart with his "no compromise on digital freedom " attitude as a part of his life style.
The day when we arrived in Guwahati, we had a visit to the office and met Mr. Monoj Kumar, deputi MD and found to our pleasant   surprise that he too is a great FOSS follower.
Another surprise we got was that GNUKhata was already deployed on a cloud instance.
One more great news for us was that they were using the Same Allrounder Gnu/Linux distro which myself and Sayali had built last year.
For any programmer it is a true compliment when the clients say they could install the program with no trouble.
This was the same case with us because the technical person told us that he did the setup in one go with no hickups.
This is a proof for all you GNUKhata followers and interested potential users that we have a stable GNUKhata with an equally stable installer.
We then visited a nice place called Kala Kshetra (meaning the region of art).
Ujwala had back pane and Trupti had to stay with her on the guest house, so they both missed that evening.
The next day was actually the first day of our official visit.
We had a discussion with Mr. Monoj Kumar about the entire schedule and then moved on to the workshop venue.
As already mentioned, we were saved of the trouble of setting the server up because it was already done by the technical team.
Mr. Kelkar started the explanation with Sayali doing the actual demo, following my initial introduction and talk on the workshop.
Sayali too chipped in with some major points and the way they 2 did the opening set the perfect tone for the rest of our workshop.
Following Sayali, Ujwala got into the act by doing the demo of all the reports, with Kelkar continuing his discussion and detailing the reasons behind many of the unique features we have in the software.
Participants included Chartered Accountants, fund many others from different organizations including a few NGOs.
We naturally got a lot of doubts from them as they were used to see tally and found our product very unique.
I had already informed all that we were and will never be interested in blindly copying what a proprietary accounting software does.
That is to say, just because Tally or some other software does a certain thing in a particular way, we won't do it unless it is a standard accounting practice.
For example our voucher system is much more user friendly and disciplining in nature.  According to Mr. Kelkar only tally 9 has such a feature.
Never the less, there were some customized requirements and most of them were feasible for immediate implementation.
the printing feature with pdf and spreadsheet option is one such feature we promise to implement immediately.
The project statement and project wise ledger were the most attractive features and were the ones to be most scrutinized.
People were even revealed to know that we have a drilldown interface but wished we also have it in both direction.
I remember Sayali had argued in favour of this feature and must confess that she had got the user mindset right in this context.
On the second day the users did a lot of hands on sessions and Mr. Kelkar assisted by all the team gave one to one attention to the problems or feedback given by all participants.
In the afternoon we met the MD Mr. Yadava, who was the mastermind behind this entire GNUKhata deployment mission.
He is really one man who is firm on his thoughts about FOSS and stands by it with 0 compromise attitude.
He is not even afraid to criticize the biggest of organizations on their approach about digital freedom and also thinks strongly that projects like Aakash needs more focus.
Fortunately he is on a deservingly high position and can take decisions within his limits, else such people are discarded by our society as rebellion.
Let me give you one example of his firm support for FOSS and his passion for using it.
I was having a meeting with the technical staff in the early evening (actually an early night in Guwahati so to speak ).
One person asked me when would there be a Windows version of GNUKhata available.  I told him that we will talk with your MD and get a team working on it.
He immediately responded "no, don't even ask him, he will never allow use of resources for this work".
Basically, I was pleased to know that Mr. Yadava has a 0 compromise approach regarding FOSS.
Well, on the 3rd day, Mr. Monoj Kumar told us that the team was very satisfied with GNUKhata and they just need some customizations for which they are ready to pay.
By jan end we will be replicating the same deployment which we used on the cloud for the 3 days training.
This upcoming deployment will be on a larger scale and will be used for serious work including managing project finance.

Over all experience

As a side note, another good outcome of the visit was that we got to visit a government blind school and introduced Orca, the Free and Open Source screen reading Software.
Amtron has a scheme of distributing free laptops to college students with Linux installed on it by default.
This year they will distribute 30000 laptops.
In this context I was aware that even blind people must be getting those machines.
When I visited the blind school, my doubts were confirmed.
They were just not aware of the Orca screen reader and now we will be holding a workshop for blind faculties very soon.
Apart from this, we had a wonderful time Visiting the Pobitra forest area famous for rhinos on 8th December and the picturesque city of Shilong on 9th.'
The trip to Shilong was in particular a beautiful experience.
I was amazed to witness the temperature drop, with mercury falling 1 degree every 2 or 3 minits when we started ascending the 5000 ft Khasi mountain to visit the said city.
The beautiful landscape, the shimmering valleys and the elephan water fall all gave a heavenly feel and as Trupti, one of our colleagues mentioned it was a "Kashmiri winter".
We also took our photos waring the traditional Meghalaya dress and the food was delicious too.
The only bad thing to end it all was that our flight has got delayed and I don't know how long will it take.
At least I got my much needed time to write this blog post and update my readers about one of the best FOSS trips I had.

Memorable FOSS Fortnight

15 blissful days of FOSS

Hello all, I am again back with some thing special after a long lull. I have been thinking of getting in touch with all my readers but the opportunity has to be right and the occasion a perfect one.

preface

Let me say at the very beginning that although I will be talking about a couple of FOSS workshops I did, there are some really special moments which I experienced along the way.
I must also mention that my colleague and our new FOSS soldier Trupti has also blogged about the recent campaigns. I will take a slightly different and a more detailed view of the past beautiful days of FOSS promotion.
Trupti (she is already in my follower's list ), has given a much classified breakup of our activities, while this blog will go into the beautiful experiences and outcomes of the last 2 workshops.
Before I start the narrative, let me profoundly thank all the team members.
Thanks a lot Ujwala for the excellent sessions, particularly on AJAX which you do so well, not to mention the handling of students.
Trupti, you have been really a wonderful company and it can be already seen that you have developed into a perfect FOSS campaigner in just a few days. Thanks for the fun you bring out in the workshop and also for your patient and intensive lab support during sessions.
I mention about my dearest wife Sayali lastly on purpose.
I did so because I needed enough time to find some words to describe her valuable contribution. She is not just a darling, loving and caring wife who always makes sure that I am relaxed, but she has been a perfect match when it came to my passion for free software and Rural education.
She has been an excellent coordinator and one of the most strict resource person we ever carried to our workshops.
Perfect in lab management during practical sessions, she is the main reason we are able to finish things in time. She has also taken up the important task of the takeoff work with her wonderful introductory session on the Unity desktop. The way she does it naturally attracts the participants towards the GUI aspect of GNU/Linux.
I don't wish to thank her for that, because it would mean thanking myself.
All in all, the real credit of my humble success belongs to my team, I am proud to be a part of such an amazing unit.

The FOSS tour of Vidharbha

This was a long awaited set of workshops, one properly planned and another obviously implied.
The Vardha workshop at Bapu Saheb College of Engineering was a planned one.
But every time I visit the said district, it is implied that I will have one workshop fixed at Amrawati, the native city of my dear old friend, prof. Dhananjay Dakhne.

So we began our journey on 16th night.
The railway has an Indian Stretchable Time (IST) yet in our case it was in time, except that we got stuck in bad rains.
The journey was quite OK, I got down to my birth with the Sony IcRecorder, listening to my favorite gazals.
On reaching Amrawati, we went to the Vandhu international hotel.
Generally, we go one day before to the destination for the workshop, because we need to setup the desktops with all the required software.
But this is not the case with Sipna collge of engineering, as Dhananjay as always takes care of all the logistics.
So we started the workshop in time.After the usual inauguration , we started our sessions on PHP.
On day one we took the basics and the sessions went pretty well.
On day two, we had a few glitches with form management and database stuff.
It was assumed that all the prerequisites have been taken care off.
But later on we realized that no matter how well Dhananjay tried, there are some management aspects which come in the way of elimination of those who are not suitable.
Generally it so happens that those who don't get selected for the workshop are angry and get themselves in after complaining to the higher authority.
Never the less, those who were learning, did it well and really enjoyed the workshop.
In-fact there was one student Aman, from that college who went to the extent of installing Ubuntu on his mac book.
Aman was the one who took very good care of our team and went with us to all the places, including Dhananjay's house where we met his 2 boys.
Many of the students kept in touch and even asked for project ideas.
In all the workshops our major emphasis is on generating love and awareness for Free Software and making the participants realize the importance of digital freedom. We could already see that the students were taking things seriously.
I feel that the real future of FOSS actually lies in the hands of students rather than faculties.
Almost all faculties we meet these days are not so concerned about FOSS. All that they care is to complete the syllabus. I request all faculties to understand the fact that it is our responsibility to make students aware of the current industry trends and also the importance of digital freedom. But there is always a golden lightening in the darkness.
Quite often we come across some teachers who are true to their profession and have a passion to make their students more passionate. Such teachers are always trying to provide new learning opportunities and developing the student's knowledge by all possible means.
I am in fact going to talk about one such lovely teacher couple in a short while.

From Amrawati we moved to Vardha (Sevagram ), the Karam Bhoomi (work field ) of the Great Mahatma Gandhi.
The Amrawati workshop finished on 18th July, and the Vardha workshop was to start on 20th.
So we went to the college on 19th itself because we knew that arrangements had to be reviewed .
Here I got my first surprise.Infact shall I say a beautiful gift?
I met my good old friend Prof Ram Mangrulkar and his lovely and sweet wife Pallavi.
Both of them have been my friends since 2010 when we went to their college for the first FOSS workshop.
Pallavi, as sweet and wonderful she is, one could see her determination backed by aggression when we visited the free lab which she has set up in the college.
I felt so humble and grateful. Humble because I had no words to express my happiness when I visited that lab, and grateful because Pallavi says she was inspired by your's truly for taking this so seriously.
We went out in the evening for a dinner with Ram and Pallavi with their cute and sweet daughter Mansi.
I must say, she had really refreshed our evening with her bubbly babbling all throughout. I am sure she too will be a smart girl when she grows up (just like her mom and dad).
Next day the workshop started as usual.
Here, I must mention that Ram and Pallavi were not the organizers of this workshop, it was a different department headed by prof. Dagadkar and the workshop was coordinated by prof. Parag Shende.
I thought that the workshop could have been managed in a much better way.
The management took a risk of taking student's laptops for setting up Ubuntu. As a result we had to make the bootable pen drives or DVDs available. Even after that, we knew that there will be so many issues, every machine is different.
The result was we had an unsuccessful first day in terms of practicals.
It was only due to Sayali's first session and sustained one-to-one interaction that kept students in the workshop.
Next day we had a lot of DVDs for the installation hands-on.
But this again came as an utter disappointment. The DVDs were not burned properly and only a few booted on the student's laptops.
Never the less we some how managed to get the setup through and moved on to other things.
At the end of the day, students were well convinced for using FOSS.
One problem with rural students is that they hardly get any exposure.
There are students who don't even know the configuration of their own laptops.
Actually they don't even know the meaning of the word configuration.
But when I see people like Pallavi taking initiatives like her free lab, I certainly see a bright hope.

From Vardha we moved on to Anandwan, the heaven created by Dr. Baba Amte, now taken well care off by his son Dr. Vikas Amte.
The one place I must say, is really a wonder.
The way Baba Amte dedicated his life to the cause of rehabilitation of the leprosy patients who are rejected by family and society is some thing we can't describe in words.
Now there is a lot of employment generated for them and much more, just to make their life more respectful and enjoyable.
We saw Anandvan on the first day of our visit, saw the projects on water conservation and wild life. Seeing the Samadhi Of Baba and his equally dedicated wife, I again realized how lucky I am, for I am one fortunate man to have an equally dedicated wife, who can one handedly handle all the rural education projects which I have initiated.
On the second day, we visited the school for the blind and it was another memorable event.
One could see the zeal in the students, perfectly mentored by their teachers.
We did a short talk on computers and the advantage of learning digital technologies.
As we all are so passionate about the digital empowerment of rural people, it was immediately decided that we will do a workshop with these students in the coming October.
We also had a meeting with Kaustubh Amte, the grand son of Baba.
He strongly feels about free software and we are about to launch a campaign in Maharashtra, the details of which will be revealed soon.
We had decided to visit the beautiful hill station of Chikhaldhara near Amrawati.
So we left for Sipna college again. Dhananjay had planned the entire trip.
He had arranged for a car in the early morning and we started by 8.
the place was just amazing. Just as we stepped out of the car for seeing the first point in the Mel ghat, our body literally switched over to winter mode. Such was the breeze and cold climate, that we wished we had our jackets on.
Truly the Switzerland of Maharashtra, it was so beautiful, I have the album on my facebook account.
The lush green slopes, the river streams, the scanty rain and the pure air, all added to the heavenly experience we had that day. To top it all, we had a wonderful late lunch at an Inn. it was a traditional Dhaba and the chicken was just delicious.
We came back to the guest house which Dhananjay had booked for us.
Next day there was a mini seminar on kernal compilation in badnera college of engineering followed by a formal meeting with the placement department of Sipna college.
We updated the placement officers about employment opportunities in FOSS which are now in abundance.
Finaly with golden memories of Palllavi's work in Vardha the time spent with Dhananjay in Amrawati and the experience we had at ChikhalDhara, we left for the station to catch the train.
All throughout the 9 days, i can say with confidence that not a single hour of the day went without Trupti or Ujwala or Sayali cracking jokes out of any thing we spoke.
Infact the days went like a fast forward seen.
We returned back for 7 days of break, just to go on another beautiful trip.

the wonderful trip of Konkan

This too was an equally awaited trip.
In fact we had been planning this long before we had even planned Vardha.
I have a special attachment to this RMCET college.
The college is situated in Ambav, the green valley of Konkan.
This place is my native village and the air is really serene and cool.
The mountains around are lush green during the rain.
Apart from that, Dr. G.V. Mulgund is extremly pro free software and has a great vision for RMCET.
with him.
We share a really sweet relation and he has always been wonderful during our union for the last 2 workshops.
Truely speaking Dr. Mulgund as usual left no stone unturned to make our stay as plesent as possible.
The lab was ready with all machine setup.
All that we did on the first day (3Rd August 2012) was just copy the php toolBox.
We always make a point to utilise the LAN setup and put necessary things on all the desktops.
We always prefer to have students install all the necessary software, including the Eclipse IDE, LAMPP and other related tools.
We do this for all kind of workshops.
We also make it a point to carry the entire Ubuntu repository mirror (51 gb) on an external hard disk so that non-availability of Internet does not become a show stopper during the setup.
We had the food in the mess, much to the disappointment of me, Sayali, Ujwala and Trupti. The issue was that we wished to go to Parvati palace for the gourmet cuisine which we had taisted during our last visit.
never the less the rain was worth getting wet and we indeed had the chance in the evening for that.
next day the workshop started and we went through the usual stuff.
Prof. Vishal Parkar saw us through the starting few sessions and had to move on for all the managerial and organizational responsibilities.
The first 2 days went very well, except that we were off the schedule due to the slowness of the students in typing code.
The lab was divided into 2 with 1 projector screen each in the lab.
This is some thing we always find irritating as it becomes difficult to manage the students in 2 different labs at the same time.
But all went well and then on the Third day, for the first time we took up joomla session.
Sayali and Ujwala did it just fine as if they have been doing this for a long time.
One very interesting comment came much to my personal satisfaction.
one student exclaimed "ye bas karo yar, kuch coding ka shuru karte hain ", meaning stop all this dude, let's do some coding stuff.
Joomla is a content management system and does not need any coding, although configuration involves some command line stuff.
What started from the forth day was most exciting.
Symfony was pritty new framework to all of us and I still can't forget that night when Myself, Ujwala and Trupti sat for a long time for getting assignments ready.
Sayali was feeling sleepy and she went, Trupti lost her wicket soon after, but me and Ujwala continued.
We make the assignments for the doctrine and were amazed at its power to quickly generate not just the classes, but also the tables including getters and setters automatically.

Next morning we were ready to teach the wonders of Symfony and knew very well that students will be equally surprised
We were not proven wrong even by a an inch.
Students just loved the way we could generate secured beautiful urls which actually connected some other php fine in the background.
Students also were very keen to start their own final year projects using PHP and Symfony on LAMPP on Ubuntu.
Oh, I keep forgetting to mention, we have modified Ubuntu and made one more distro called AllRounder Linux. This brand contains all that Ubuntu has by default, plus many more software which the user has to otherwise download from the net.
Sayali is the key inspiration behind this and also the marketing force.
The best feedback was when students expressed their view that this workshop should have been for a longer time.
Of course just like Vardha, we had some not so serious and stupid lot sitting in the lab for nothing.
But as Prof. Mulgund was advising an angry Sayali, we must always assume .20% of the crowd to be like that every where.
The workshop was over and we were as satisfied as Prof. Mulgund or Prof Parker themselves.
Not to mention that we indeed had our dinner for last 3 days of the workshop at Parvati Palace.
So as soon as the workshop got over, we were invited to Mr. Mane's (well that's not my house ) residence.
Mr. mane is an educationalist and a former minister for education.
He is the chairman of Rajendra Mane College of Engineering and Technology (RMCET).
The food was great. (Prawns, Crab, oisters ) and kurried mutton, much to the delight of we non-veg fans.
Ah, and did I forgot to mention that Trupti has progressed in this field too?
She now loves the non-veg food and savers it as much as we do.
So Trupti, join the Gang!
The last day of our trip was the most amaising one.
After such a stressful yet satisfying workshop and the flash talks I gave to other departments on FOSS, the best day was yet to come.
We had booked a car to go to Thoseghar water falls, one of the most beautiful places around and a part of that western ghats which now is recognised by UNISCO for its beauty.

True to its reputation, this was what they call the 7th heaven.
Absolutely green and picturesque one can describe it as a freshly married princess in all her royal green dress with all the ornaments.
We went through the beautiful Amba Ghat that connects Konkan and Kolhapur and headed towards satara.
The air was so pure and to top it all, we had Kshitij, a photography freek who is passionate about that art.
he has published his artwork on a highly professional level to date.
We were also accompanied by Aniruddh, son of Dr. Mulgund.
Infact Kshitij's photos are already up on my facebook account along with a lot of once taken from Sayali's camera.
The wind was so chill that we had to start the heater in the car.
We savored the fun of getting soaked in rains and enjoying the chilled weather.
The waterfall was so loud, I was reminded of the moment when 60000 crowd went up in a tremendous roar on the stadium when India won the cricket world cup.
We really had a great day all in all.
Went back to RMCET by 1.15 AM past. we had the dinner in Chiplun at 12.15 before finally heading for the last part of our journey.
In short the last 15 days have been a dream come true.
An experience which has made such a mark on my memory that i would remember it till my doom's day.
A couple of great FOSS workshops, learning and teaching the Symfony framework and all this lovely places to visit, what more can one expect in a single package?

First Major GNUKhata deployment

preface

Hello all,
This time I am back after a relatively short lul after my last blog post.
needless to say, there is some thing really special and particularly for the project I fondly initiated in the winter of 2009.
GNUKhata, www.gnukhata.org is the free and open source replacement for proprietary accounting software solutions (I won't mention only one name, although it is very popular amongst accountants who tally so many books of their customers).
We have been developing the software rigorously since last 2 years, thanks to the sustained availability of funds provided by National Mission on Education through Information Communication Technology (NMEICT).
Prof. Kannan from IIT mumbai helped the project to get these funds and to keep it sustained as well.
Many supporters, well wishers and developers of GNUKhata have been urging me to write a blog on the one project closest to my and their hearts.
I kept on refraining from doing so, half due to the busy development schedule and half due to the fact that I wished to write it on a perfect occasion.
Finally the waiting is over and what an occasion!

the success story

So my readers might be wondering what's the reason that pushed me to write this blog which I kept away from writing for last 2 years?
The moment is indeed very proud for me as well as the entire community around GNUKhata.

I am pleased to declare that we had the first successful deployment of GNUKhata on 8th June 2012.
It has been a long way we have come and had a lot of ups and downs in the way.
We had a release last year which was good for few situations but not good enough for every one to use.
Then came the release in feb 2012 where we made it very feature rich and suitable for almost all accounting needs.
Now we have a rock solid GNUKhata on the basis of which any SME can reliably do their book keeping.

We got this success when the entire annual audit of International Center for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) was successfully conducted using GNUKhata for the year 2011-12.
We arrived in Trivandrum and straight away headed for the ICFOSS office on the 7th June.
It was just myself and Sayali who actually went there, but we had the entire core team ready on the base here in Mumbai along with our most popular and dynamic domain expert Mr. Arun Kelkar.
Deploying GNUKhata on the local server at ICFOSS was not a big issue as we had the installer ready.
We off late had a small issue with starting up the server and that too got fixed in the process.
We already had a cloud based deployment of GNUKhata where all the data was kept ready.
Here I must mention that this is not the first ever deployment of GNUKhata.
We did it in Latur where data of 4 organizations was entered successfully.
But that was on a relatively small scale and the data was very straight forward.
With ICFOSS though, the data was huge involving large volumes of transactions.
There were more than 1200 vouchers and all things were entered by Sayali, Ujwala, Trupti and Nutan, under the guidance of Mr. Kelkar.
Following the deployment, we had a meeting with Mr. Satish Babu.
he instantly proposed that we setup a steering committee for sustained development and dissemination of GNUKhata in Kerala and other states.


Thanks to his prompt decisions, ICFOSS will even pump in some much needed funds for further development.

On 8th June, we sat with Mr. Satish Babu and his accountants to tally the books.
We did the comparison on a monthly basis.
Every time the books tallied the happiness went on increasing.
Sure there were some glitches, not due to the problem in the software but due to mistakes in the data.
Finally it all tallied for the entire year and the good news triggered a wave of joy and excitement in the entire GNUKhata camp.

With this successful deployment, Satish Babu told us that the entire Kerala state will be using GNUKhata soon, because he would be actively taking up the deployment in the said state on a bigger scale.

looking ahead

Following the successful deployment, we had a post audit meeting with the same team of accountants and a few experts.
Including Mr Satish Babu himself, there were many enhancements suggested by all who attended the meeting.
A few major enhancements included a drill down interface where one can jump from one report to another in context of trial balance or ledger.
For example while seeing a ledger, one should be able to click on a voucher and directly see if there is a mistake in it.
Similarly one should be able to jump from trial balance to ledger for a particular account.
at the same time, many features like the unique extended trial balance were highly appreciated by the accountants.
Seeing the success, we decided to launch an interim version 1.2 on 30th June 2012.
this release will have most of the important features requested by ICFOSS.
The selected features are those which will impact the user experience for almost all users.
So that's it from me.
Watch out for the latest version on June 30th (who knows another blog post might be on its way before that happens)

My Recent FOSS Campaigns

preface

Hello all,Firstly let me say at the very beginning that the blog is still alive and it is just that I neither had enough things happening worth blogging, nor I had the time to do so.

Right now I earned this time, thanks to my wife Sayali who actually took up the job of pulling me out of stress and bordum by urging me to visit her village house. As if that was not sufficient for me to relax and enjoy. We had a great time in Delhi, working on a project by HP called Lab In a Box, more about that later.

In fact I was in a wonderful mood for writing this blog sitting out side the very beautiful house of my equally charming wife, but my travel back home was dicey.

The bus tickets were not confirmed and so it took a great deal of time before I had some time.

But dinner (we had excellent curried mutton and dry spicy chicken ) took away all the remaining time and writing some thing in a State Transport Bus is undesirable if one wants to protect the laptop.

However as they say, all things happen for the good and it is at least true in my case.

If I had compiled this blog post at that time, then I would not have so much to write about ...

Well, enough background I guess and sorry for my long mono log on preface.

On The Road To Digital Freedom

In the recent FOSS campaigns and workshops which Myself and my team did,we had a fairly good success rate in convincing few faculties and a huge number of students about the dangers and restrictive nature of proprietary software.

My readers might be already aware that I don't believe in doing workshops for shear awareness but also for helping those who wish to migrate, either as an individual or institute/organization.

In fact I don't do any thing extra ordinary or brilliant. I share the knowledge which is already there and just speak the truth. the very reason I succeed where most fail is the simple fact that I myself believe in what I tell others and I don't promote FOSS as a marketing stunt or some thing similar.

It is sad that we often see people using Mac book and try telling people "Linux is so great, it has really come a long way and we all must give it a try."

and then come down to this common dialog, "well, you can try it out for a thing or 2 and help developers improve it. We still don't have a very user friendly Linux desktop and common man can't use it with extreme ease".

I wonder what such people are trying to convey, except that "there is some thing called Linux which is not good enough, but might be in future"".

The point I am raising here is not about forcing people to use Linux, I would never do it myself given my value for freedom.

The point I strongly object is the signals of hypocrisy which such people give.

My advice to such backdore promoters of proprietary software is simple and straight.

If you don't believe in FOSS, all the best and you are free to go your way, but don't spread wrong information about FOSS and don't talk about it if you don't believe in it.

FOSS is a successful revolution, and now much beyond just a revolution, it is a way of Business and life in general.

So we don't need any false sympathy or "come on you will be better some day " kind of cheer leadership from such sudo advocates of FOSS.

Any ways coming to the point where I started.

Amongst the many colleges we visited in Maharashtra, one particular college that shows a great determination in shifting to FOSS is Ravindra Mane College of Engineering and Technology.

Apart from the wonderful workshop, I remember the beautiful tiem I spent with my darling wife (then girl friend ) in the beautiful locations of Ganpati pule (seeming to be the Indian version of spain ), following the surprise birthday party we arranged for her in the bungalow of Avanish, our GNUKhata colleague.

Actually I was linked to this college from another institute named Sindhudurga Shikshan Prasarak Mandal (SSPM) in Kankavali.

In fact SSPM is also making a modest attempt to shift to FOSS, thanks to some valiant attempt of Prof. Raman Bane, the HOD of IT department of the said college. Talking about RMCET, it was the most beautiful experience and one of the successful campaigns we had in the recent past.

We did a general FOSS awareness and migration workshop for teachers from the Konkan belt in RMCET, under the Short Term Training program (STTP) project started by the Many universities in Maharashtra.

about 90% of the faculties were more than just interested.

Many of them had some primary understanding of "Linux" as they knew it and were mostly of the impression that it is all command line and not for daily use. This is thanks to many marketing personals and prof.s who have knowingly or unknowingly spread this dirty mith.

But as Usual my team follows a 3 phase strategy to make people aware of the better realities of FOSS.

1, inform the participants about similarities in GNU/Linux and the other proprietary OS they have used. Tell them how standards compliant is the office software and how they can use Firefox and VLC and similar things.

We have always observed one fact and more so in the recent times.

People are nothing but uninformed and in many cases intentionally miss informed about many facts.

One common exercise we do is first ask "how many of you already use FOSS daily?" most of the time there are hardly any raised hands.

Of course now a days the number has definitely gone up.

Then we ask "how many of you are using either firefox, Vlc or both?"

now when almost all raise their hands, we strike them with a shock wave "do you know Firefox and Vlc are Free and Open Source Software!"

Then we go on to explain this problem.

we make it a point to tell people that the reason they all got surprised is because the marketing fiends from the proprietary industry don't want you all to know that FOSS is used for every thing in every day tasks these days.

In our initial demo and explanation, we show them how easily they can open all kind of documents and spreadsheets or presentations which they might have made on a proprietary OS.

2, some things are better than the proprietary OS, although a bit different.

Talk about Virus and every one is ears up and eyes wide open.

the fact that Linux is totally free of the concept of virus goes a long way in appealing to the common man.

It is however not as easy as it seems.

one dirty trick that Microsoft has used to mislead people is by a marketing mith that goes, "since Linux is not popular, there is no reason for writing virus. Windows is used by 99% people so there is virus".

We urge every one including readers of this post to notice a few things.

Firstly, is Linux the only system without Virus?

Well, if popularity is the determining factor of virus, then what about I-phones, what about the so very popular android?

Why virus never was an issue for Unix servers?

Windows wished to have a system of virus for making people dependent on softwares like anti virus.

and 99% people using windows?

nothing can be far from a dirty marketing trick which is not even based on correct data!

After the first and the second strategy, we have mostly observed that people are well convinced and at least ready to listen further.

In fact with recent experiences at SSPM and RMCET, along with a couple of workshops in Latur and Nanded, we have found that many participants bring over their personal laptops on the second or third day of the workshop and ask our fellow team maits to help install Ubuntu Linux on the machine.

This has become such a common trend that we almost have to keep a day extra for such activities.

This just goes to show the keen interest people have shown off late to totally switch to FOSS.

finally we show them some complex stuff which is quite different from the proprietary OS which they are addicted to.

by this time the audience is ready to take in some complex things.

Most often than not, we take this workshop/ seminar for 3 days.

first day we cover the principles of Free Software and stress upon the digital freedom followed by the overview of graphical desktop.

By the way, I never understood why so many individuals or organisations make tutorials or books which lay a lot of stress on commandline interface, so much so that people come to beleive that GNU/Linux is not good at GUI.

This is a totally wrong stratergy and must be given up by any one who wishes more and more people enjoy the real advantages of Linux desktop with its simplicity and power.

Most of the recent workshops have been on the same theem, "GNU/Linux, the easy, secured, flexible and powerful free desktop".

We had a wonderful time at Nanded where Prof. Chaudhari is trying his best to bring university to understand the importance of FOSS.

he is the man who successfully migrated one university in Konkan (BATU) to FOSS.

Infact looking at the recent success, myself and Sayali launched a new distro called Allrounder Linux.

just the tagline says it all.

"from office to entertainment, Linux with you every where "

Of course we will alter it to "GNU/Linux" every where.

We have included all the tools for almost any thing one can imagine.

Although I have helped Sayali to remaster the original Ubuntu distro, the entire credit of marketing goes to her.

But all these workshops can be considered regular, because just a couple of weeks have passed after I got a very beautiful surprise.

I was invited by HP (the makers of laptops, desktops and other things like printers ), for conducting a teacher training workshop for visually disabled in Delhi.

They have recently started a project called Lab In a Box (LIB).

You can look at my facebook profile for some amaising pictures of LIB which our team took there.

Basically the idea is "Digital school that goes to the students any where ", cudoes to MD of HP Asia and my good old friend Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya.

The concept is based on setting up a computer lab in a ship container.

15 computers in a container, which can be moved any time any where.

Inside we have an internet connection, a generater and ample place for putting up black/ white boards.

This is such a brillient idea that we can take school to the students in those areas where students don't get a school.

Imagine what could happen if such LIB is placed in every vilage where school has not yet reached?

or at places where schools are far away.

Besides, the box is water proof and earth quake proof.

I already officially wrote to HP about my views and we will be installing LIB in a lot of rural places, starting with Maharashtra.

My immediate targets are Vidharbha and Konkan.

for example We plan to take this to Hemal Kasa, an adivasi area where one of the 2 suns of Baba Ampte, Dr. Prakash Amte has his setup.

Of course I don't even need to mention about Anand Van and the work that has been done by the Amte family in that area.

We are also planning to sett up another in Sawant Wadi for the bennifit of visually disabled people.

The point to notice here, is that LIB uses Ubuntu Linux and all FOSS tools for education of the under priviledged students.

And now with the advent of Unity desktop, it has become all the more accessible for blind people.

We infact recommended HP to switch their machines to Ubuntu 12.04, at least for the blind students who would be using Orca.

some thing beyond FOSS

Another experience that took my mindsare is the Amar Jyoti school.

Dr. Uma Tuli, the founder of this school has been successfully providing inclusive education to students with or without disability.

On the last day of my Visit to Delhi, we spend a few hours at the school and were amaised by looking at the way students with any or no disability were taking education together.

The premices is totally accessible with ramps for wheel chairs every where and accessible tiles for blind students.

There were many other things which Delhi visit made me feel so happy about.

Not forgeting the little Vaishali, a 7th grade blind student and the way she took us with surprise with her knowledge about computers.

"Aap mujhe internet de do, baki main seekh lungi " "Give me just the Internet and I will learn the rest " was what she told Ujwala and Sayali when they met her during the first practical session.

Only sad part was that KV school should have cooperated more with such a noble project and shown some more value for the gift they got from HP.

But that's the way of the world today I guess.

Any ways, It is high time I sign off and let my readers take a breath before I start on another topic.

I will come back with some more amaising experiences in my journey to digital freedom.

Good by and enjoy your freedom.

Digital Drishti

Hello readers.
It has been a long, Really long time since I posted any thing.
But I nither had time nore some realy great thing happened.
Not that I am free now, but some thing really great has happened, or at least started to happen in a big way.

Digital Drishti, a project for Education and employment of the blind

Well, Many who know my work will be aware that I have been conducting a lot of FOSS awareness and migration workshops.
But Those are pritty well known now so I did not find it worth wile to blog about it.
So Why am I blogging about this particular project?
As the title says its some thing to do with vision "Drishti". And its also digital.
So needless to say that its extremly important to make people aware about it.
Another reason to blog about it is because I any ways wanted to write about Vinux, www.vinux.org.uk a modified version of Ubuntu with more specialised facility for blind.
And the said project is very closely related to this distro.
So afterall what is Digital Drishti?
Actually it is a known fact that masses of Blind people are either unemployed or underemployed even with the qualifications and talents they have,
Since ICTs are so important, it is necessary that blind community also becomes computer literate.
But that's not the problem. Blind people are very much capable of doing computer based jobs right from data entry, medical transcription till advanced jobs like server administration or even main streem programming.
Many are infact good analysts and often found in law field.
So Given their computer knowledge they should have never faced the problem of getting jobs that require to use computers.
But still the fact is that they don't.
The reason?
Most blind users are either unaware or little aware about Free and Open
Source Software.
Most blind computer users know Windows and use certain proprietory softwares like Jaws or Windoeyes.
The problem is that these softwares are very costly and many a times restrictive in nature.
As a result employers are not willing to spend a few thousand $s for
employing few blind people.
And this is but natural and practical on the part of employers to think so.
For example, Here in Mumbai (India) the State Bank of India (SBI) employs blind telephone operators. The said organisation has employed more than 200 blind people in the last 2 years.
Most of these employees are well qualified to do various more respectful and deserving jobs including clerical and other desk jobs.
Many have a masters degree and have more scope for higher promotions.
Yet all these employees are only taken in for customer care and telephone booth management.
The problem with Organisations like SBI is that if these many people were to be given computer based jobs, it means a few million $s will have to be spent for purchasing license for their screen reader.
This is obviously unjustified investment on the part of any such organisation.
It becomes more unjustified given the FOSS based alternatives which are pritty much good enough to be used on real time bases.
The only problem thus is about making blind people and their potential employers aware of this alternative.
If more and more organisations are made aware that they need not spend any thing on licenses of screen readersm then the willingness of employers to give computer based jobs to the blind people will naturally increase drastically.
At the same time, it is necessary to train blind people on these FOSS based screen reader.
Digital Drishti is a project aimed at achieving these to goals.
The ultimate vision of Digital drishti is to create an eco system wherein the well trained blind community can get jobs without feering of license cost for the technology which can bridge the digital divide.
The plan is to lonch a comprehensive course using free and open course where.
This course is under developmental consideration from Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
While we are in the process of creating a perfect course,
As a preparation I on behalf of IIT have started a series of workshops on the Orca screen reader running it with Vinux Distro of GNU/Linux.
The first workshop was held in New Delhi.

about the starter workshop

The basic idea is based around the concept of spoken tutorial ( www.spoken-tutorial.org )
Spoken tutorial is a government funded project in IIT Bombay.
Funded by the National Mission on Education through Information Comunication Technology (NMEICT), the project aims at large scale audio visual documentation of FOSS.
These tutorials are pedagogically designed and recorded so as to facilitate optimum learning with minimum or no supervision.
I was asked by the project to build tutorials for Orca screen reader on same grounds.
In one of the meetings with Prof. Kannan, the project lead, I suggested that we should take this a step ahead and make it a starting point of a comprehensive ICT trainning project for the blind.
Following the completion of 12 basic tutorials, we decided that its time to lonch the project and thus this first workshop was held in New Delhi.
More than 40 participants from many organisations participated in this workshop.
All of them were given the set of spoken tutorials and were made to do preplanned assignments on the basis of these tutorials.
I personally find Vinux as the most accessible distro. Thus all the tutorials were made using Vinux/.
The feedback from the participants was moderate to extremly good.
Infact some of the participants even handed us their laptops for immediately converting to Vinux, while some asked us how they could dual boot and get startd.
Overall every one at least agreed that this has to be taken ahead and the course is of extreme importance for future employment of the massive educated blind community in India.
If Vinux continues the current pase of getting better and better, we will certainly be able to generate a best fit employment oriented course.
Most of the blind users found vinux 60% usable in its current state.
The plan is to hold another mega workshop to promote the project and get more people to use Orca.
This will happen in the southern part of India in Vishaka Patnam.
I will keep the blog posted about that workshop as well.
More than 100 students will learn Orca during the next workshop.
Feedback from these workshops will be taken into serious consideration while planning the actual course which the said univercities of IGNOU and IIT wish to jointly lonch.
The course will be open for other organisations to conduct. The course material including the spoken tutorials will also be kept open.
It is expected that by May or June, we will have a course ready to be implemented.
needless to say that with the growing popularity of FOSS in the industry, this will become a sweet coincident that we will have a wonderful distro called Vinux which Blind people will be able to use for demonstrating their real potentials to future employers.

Indian blind people find FOSS important

Orca is gaining massive exceptance amongst indian Blind community

I just returned from Pune, a city in India known for its educational heritage and culture of respecting knowledge.

I conducted a workshop to train Blind computer users on Ubuntu GNU/Linux with Orca.

The Orca screen reader, http://live.gnome.org/orca is by far the most advanced Screen reader in almost all aspects of accessibility for Blind people.

It not just includes the best features from other (proprietory ) screen readers, but has added a few more toppings on the cake.

It is now more than sufficient for all ICT needs except a handful of computing tasks (which most people rarely do any ways).

I arrived in Pune univercity's computer cell for the blind and immediately realised that most computers were running the popular proprietory screen raeder called JAWS.

I was told by Dhananjay Bhole, the HOD that there are hardly any blind students who even want to use Linux.

Dhananjay, who is himself blind has been Using Orca since a year or so and we had been planning this workshop since last few months.

I told him on the day before the workshop that we must ourselfs take initiative to encourage and orient people to stay away from any proprietory technology and use only FOSS.

he immediately replied "no, this might not happen because Jaws is extremly popular and you will not get good response in just 2 days."

Actually I have already led the setup of an IT trainning center for blind In Kerala, a southern sate in India.

The uniqueness of the Insight center in Kerala is that it is the first one to make exclusive use of FOSS, particularly Orca.

Although Dhananjay and his crue knew this fact, but they were not aware of many aspects of orientation of Blind in using FOSS.

This was the exact reason for such a pesimistic view. And from his Point of you, the Head of that lab was right given his limited knowledge about the technology itself and the way to teach it.

Well, just read on and you will know how true and correct was the assessment made by dhananjay.

about the workshop

Anusha as always has been my hand, my brain and my "one man army ".

She has the right attitude and the needed knowledge to manage such workshops.

What's more, she knows wen where and how of promoting FOSS, and she is absolutely perfect in it!

As usual she set about installing Ubuntu on the machines. I had been planning the workshop with Dhananjay in all aspects. During our discussions, he had told me that the machines had just windows and he will need windows to boot up as the first (and *default*) operating system after we dual boot with Ubuntu.

Whether we did it or not is to be revealed later. So just read on.

I know I am creating too much of suspence. Nice way to force people to read the entire blog ha?

Any ways, conclusions are always mentioned at the end so I have not really talked about the outcome so far.

I went about configuring Orca on every machine which Anusha had setup in a very short period of time.

Since our last couple of workshops, we have started to use a USB startup disk to install Ubuntu.

This saves time a bit and we don't need Cd ROMs on every machine.

So the day ended with all the setup done and Orca configured with relatively slow speed, Tutorial messages turned on and the option for speaking shortcut keys turned on as well.

I Also keep the echo by character, word and sentence checked as well.

These settings have proved to be very helpful during my workshops, because participants tend to come with an Idea that Espeak speech Synthesizer is difficult to understand.

This is particularly true with those users who have used JAWS or Window-Eyes before.

So with speech rate set to 40 and all the other settings which I just mentioned, I find it easy to clear out the misconception.

Besides I also set the person to UK english which is even more clear.

Day 1

The day started with Usual inogural talks and introductions. Dr. Nandedkar, a blind PH.D in pharmacy was the chief guest.

He made a few very important points in his inogural talk.

to quote him,

"technology is so crutial in blind person's life that at times I find it more loyal than my wife ".

That was interesting.

Another interesting point was,

"Open source is a major thing for every one and for blind people it is all the more important. We must understand that the freedom to alter and customise software is very very important so that we can have Orca exactly made the way we want".

I was happy that at least he mentioned about factors beyond lisence fees.

Well apart from this, most of his speech was a kind of self introduction of how he got award from the president of India etc.

But the moral of his talk was, "take full advantage of these 2 days and since you have an experienced resource person from the field, you will have all your doubts solved".

I followed it up with my initial "need for free software " talk where I heavily focused on the aspects of free as in freedom and how it directly affects the accessibility of ICTs.

One factor which really appealed the participants was the socio echonomic disadvantage of proprietory Screen readers.

I found meny participants commenting in the feedback saying, "if my employee has to invest 1000 dollers in getting a software for me, then he *will* choose a sighted person of my caliber and not spend that money ".

This is indeed a major observation and its pritty obvious yet not so well recognised by Blind community.

my opening talk was terminated abruptly because there was another program to happen (and our program started late due to some management issue).

Any ways, I had already covered the most important aspects such as how restrictive is the proprietory software and what it means by a community driven project, which is also well funded.

I also raised a few questions such as "if windows is your ICT GOD and JAWS your true friend as many think, then why is it that blind people can't really install Windows without any sighted assistance?"

This obviously initiates a thinking process in the listeners mind.

Another spark to kindle the fire is, "by the way how many Indian languages does any proprietory screen reader support? and are there web sites your proprietory screen reader can't access?"

So finally with an almost complete FOSS talk, we moved on to the lab which we had setup the previous day.

I started to demonstrate the Orca preferences and how one can modify the settings to the liking.

I made a mention that one can even change the keyboard shortcuts in orca.

I then went on to walk through the Applications menu in Ubuntu.

there were 3 immediate remarks which the participants made and almost every one agreed.

Dinesh Thole, one of my favorites remarked, " the speech is so very understandable and infact more clear".

Secondly, a few participants who were already JAWS users, commented that they found commands almost similar.

and an important observation was made by a few others that the Menus in Ubuntu are very well organised.

I then showed them the basic text editer (gedit) and told them to type a few lines of text and navigate around.

This way they not just checked with adjusting Orca preferences but could also use Applications menu and also get used to the Orca navigation keyboard commands.

Post lunch I took up some more advanced tasks such as using the word processor.

I made it a point to show them how similar is the set of shortcuts for selecting and formatting text between Microsoft Office and Open Office.

All the participants ended up practicing office softwares in the later part of the day.

But the main surprise for me came in the last session.

I did the demo of Hindi speech with Espeak and to my utter disbelief, participants just loved the way it sounded!

"this is not so bad at all!" said Anuja, a Blind girl who is doing journalism from a college in Mumbai.

Of course some students pointed out that a few words are not that correctly pronounced, but that did not seem to bother them a lot.

So, I took them to Hindi wikipedia and also showed them Hindi google.

I had to stop the session at that point because Internet was to be covered in details the next day.

We took a quick feedback, and for those of you who are waiting impatiently to know about that dual boot issue, here's what happened.

Anusha took over the feedback session and asked, "do you all feel comfortable using Ubuntu? will you like to use it often?" to which all the participants answered yes.

she then asked if we should change the boot options to show Windows by default so that you can use it for most part of the day?

"noooo!" came a resounding reply and struck those who had asked us to do it by all means.

It was clear from the feedback that The participants had become fairly comfortable using Ubuntu. They said that although they will need windows for a few days untill they get totally used to and confident with Ubuntu, they will only use the proprietory OS to solve any problems.

day 2

The Second and last day was mainly for internet related softwares.

We started by demonstrating firefox with Orca.

The Trick I used here was very simple yet effective.

I opened FF and started asking questions to the participants regarding the keyboard commands they use on Windows with IE or FF and JAWS.

Soon the trick started to show its effect.

"sir, press u for moving to the next link." said Dinesh who was already happy to know that the headings and visited links are navigated in exactly the same way he did using JAWS.

I made them tell me all other commands such as alt + d for the address bar and CTRL + enter for completing the www and .com before and after a URL respectively.

they were so happy to know that even 1 to 6 would exactly do the same heading navigation as JAWS does.

I gave enough time for practicals. By now participants had not just Excepted Orca, but started to enjoy it.

What's more, I found Anuja, the would-be journalist was oepning hindi web sites and trying to read news etc.

At this point the Lunch was due and I decided to let them play a bit more with internet.

They all were glad to know that twitter and face book were accessible using Orca.

Post lunch I again used a typical padagogy of asking people about how they chat.

"we use google talk for chatting on google, Yahoo messenger for yahoo and msn messenger for msn ".

I asked them what if they get an "all-in-one" messenger for chatting?

And I could impress them with pidgin.

As if that was not enough, I also showed them how to use IRC and get instant help.

This as always happens, raised the confidence level of participants.

When you show them IRC channels, they tend to feel more secured and relaxed about the potential problems they are going to face during the learning curve.

The day ended with a short overview of the Ubuntu installer which is accessible with Orca.

conclusion brought happy surprises

We did the final feedback session with Mr. Sonavane, a senior faculty in Pune Univercity as the chief guest.

the conclusion after the student's feedback was that we will now have to setup more machines with Ubuntu.

"I am going to contribute to the development of ORCA!" said Dinesh Thole who was doing his Batchler of Computer Applications (BCA) from Pune.

Another interesting comment from Sangapal was, "linux is so systematic. I find it more comfortable than windows".

Anuja added that Hindi was what she came looking for and orca with espeak is giving a fairly good output.

All participants (25) to be presise, raised the concern that they nither have a pdf reader nor a software that does scann and OCR.

This is an important and a serious concern which has to be solved pritty soon.

I asked all the participants if they are really thinking to make Orca their screen reader of choice.

Every one told me that within a month, they see themselves only using Orca.

Dhananjay who had told me "they will not change in 2 days " was proved to be totally wrong.

But the best part of his personality is that he happyly excepted his misjudgement and told me that now he will take up the responsibility of following this up and continue trainning more students based on the pattern I had shown him in the 2 days.

Now we are planning advanced workshops and the Dhananjay is creating a FOSS based computer trainning course.

It can be expected that hundreds of students in and around Pune will now start using Orca and will raise their chances of employment.

I am starting a similar project here in my home city Mumbai as well.

Orca, the ICT lifeline for Blind

With its latest features,Orca is now the best screen reader

I have been using Orca for last 3 years and alas I did not need to touch the digitally dangerous and restrictive windows since then.

I am so happy that I could break free off the absolutely useless crap called Microsoft windows and the related software like Microsoft office etc. Interestingly enough one of the best fullforms I created for windows is "Where I Never Do Operations With Safety".

Any ways enough jokes and bashing, back to the topic.

I thought I must talk about Orca because it is getting better than the best day by day and improving on its own previous featureset.

But being the state-of-the-art screen reader, oracle has stopped the funding for this project after they took over Sun Micro Systems.

This is a major concern for the daily life of many blind people including their future in jobs and professions through which they earn livelyhood. I think after reading this blog, my readers will firstly understand how important Orca is given the features I am going to list. As a result they will also understand why we should do every thing to not just keep Orca alive but developing at full speed.

So what does Orca offer to Blind computer users?

Well, as is expected basically from any screen reader, Orca integrates seemlessly with the Desktop (Gnome) on GNU/Linux.

It reads out all text and related attributes, provides spoken feedback as focus shifts from one widgit to another.

It also reads popups and message boxes requiring user input.

Looking a little further, it works really good with Office software (Open Office) and also helps to surff internet using firefox.

We must remember that unlike many proprietory software like Jaws for Windows, we get all this for free.

And yes not to mention that unlike Jaws and other proprietory software, Orca can also be localised in regional languages.

Even the Espeak speech synthesizer which Orca uses by default is free.

But that's not all to it.

The features I have mentioned before are there in every screen reader. And yes, write or wrong, almost every one uses pirated software for personal without paying for the proprietory License. This means people might argue that cost is not a major factor, although commertial or non-commertial organisations (generally) don't take chances with non-licensed software.

Never the less issue is not about cost. The important fact about Orca is that it is free (as in freedom) and there is no law violation if it is used on any numbers of computers for free.

Infact it is this freedom which has resulted into the superior features and better accessibility on GNU/Linux based desktops.

People from all around the world have contributed to Orca's development. And today here it is, the best screen reader a blind person can ever get on Linux.

Talk about the best internet accessibility and Orca with firefox is just awsom.

May it be face book or twitter, from any on-line forum to an on-line newspaper, Orca provides accessibility through Firefox with perfection.

What's more, I just installed the 2.27.92 version of Orca and now I can even interract with mouse overs!

What's more, the navigation bundle which comes as an extention to firefox is also totally accessible with orca.

the moment I press ctrl + shift + l, I get the list of links on the page as a dropdown. I know I know, this features are in Jaws as well, But remember Orca is a total replacement for jaws and what is generally excepted as good accessibility feature is incorporated in Orca.

And add to it that it is free in all sence, meaning you don't buy any license by paying fees. Yu also get the updates free.

On office productivity suite, Open office with orca just rocks.

I am particularly impressed about the level of accessibility with spreadsheets.

For example, if I type more in a certain cell than it can accomodate, Orca warns me that the text I entered is x characters longer. How amaising! I can then use the optimisation tools on the given cell for the column or row.

I can even set column and row headers so that I know the context of the information in the given cell.

All I need to do is to press capslog r for laptop or insert r for desktop and Orca will announce the column heading taking the text from the cells of the row I selected.

These are just a few important developments which have happened in orca off late. Infact these new features got added very rappidly and the speed at which orca has grown in last few months is like never before. This is all due to the dedicated programmers and accessibility experts like william walker of the accessibility department of Sun.

Joanmary is also from the same dedicated group. Infact her work on accessibility of Firefox is some thing which hardly any one can achieve in such a short span of time.

Talk about thunderbird or pidgin, or even the cd burning tool brasero, these dedicated set of developres have put their heart and brains into accessibility with orca.

I hav done a couple of huge educational projects for blind students and orca proved to be a blessing for them.

the most successful of these projects resulted into a dedicated lab for trainning blind computer users at Trivandrum, a city in south India. Insight as it is named, this project involved creating FOSS based course for blind people. I personally did 4 major faculty trainning workshops there. I also developed a plan where young blind students can study normal computer lesons at school using orca.

The project was successful in not just education but also led to employment of many blind people on desk jobs.

Following this project, I also led the true vision project about which enough has been sed on other blogs created by members of the orca mailing list.

True Vision was the biggest project ever in India for bringing computer based education to masses of blind people.

Led by me and funded by Electronic Corporation of Tamilnadu (ELCOT), it resulted into all the schools in the southern India state of tamilnadu install orca on their computers.

Besides, all the blind schools in that state were given free computers with Ubuntu and orca pre-installed.

Given all the superior features and the amount of promotive work done for orca, we should have expected that the progress will catch more momentum. I think it will certainly accelerate in terms of programming, but would take some time to regain the speed.

I am not talking of bug fixing or adding pending features. I am refering to the challenges ahead of the Orca team.

Oracle has narrowmindedly decided to shut down any further support to Orca and the programmers of the accessibility Department are thus rendered jobless.

I don't want to say any further on how senceless and careless Oracle is about orca. I won't even discuss how Oracle thinks of blind people being useless and how they don't feel a need that we as blind people don't need free information access.

Some discussions on the orca mailing list further confirm my conclusion. It seems that oracle hardly responds to any accessibility calls.

Any ways let that be a dirty past. We must look to the future.

Perhaps some people might be daydreaming about how Oracle one day might change the mind and restart the accessibility department. And how I wish that it really happens!

But we can't rely on private profit making organisations like Oracle to do much for the most important need of a blind computer user.

looking ahead

I think while people like Your's truely are doing a lot of work in educational policys using FOSS and particularly Orca for blind students, an active efert must be made to sustain a dedicated team of developers for Orca. We need able and expert leaders like William Walker to really work dedicatedly for Orca, but not at the cost of keeping such people hungry.

We have to look for options to bring in Funds.

I propose a few organisations like NL Net or Software for Public Interest (SPI) be contacted for such things.

I am myself persuing this matter with FSF India and would also try getting some big research organisations involved into Orca.

I think many people all around the world can try to help in many ways.

Orca has reached to a place where blind computer users can totally rely on it.

It is no more just a software tool. It is a lifeline for B lind people today. Given the fact that digital access to information is as important as food clothing and shelter, the only way blind people can get education and employment is through freely available accessibility tools.

And with all its features (and growing ) Orca is the only perfect choice for Linux based desktop which is free as well.

FOSS based education gains importance in Latur

Another awareness camp, another success

I was in the auradh district of Latur (Maharashtra ) between 26th Jan and 3rd Feb 2010.
The experience me and the entire team got was some thing unique.
It was full of contrasts, surprises and amaisement.
I arrived on the republic day in Latur. The train was on time and we stepped out of the 2 tier AC compartment, just to find that the AC inside was much better and warmer than the outside climate.
We had been informed by Prof. Shingare that the climate is pritty cold (infact chilled ) and we better be prepared.
It was around 6 degrees outside and Shantanu from the FOSSy group was oblivious of this fact.
He did not come with any jirkin or swetter.

Any ways, Mr. Prasad Patil who also happens to teach at MDM college aurad came to pick us up from the station.
at a short distance we met Lakshmikant the founder and MD of Swayam Shiksha Prayog (SSP) Latur. We sat in the near by hotel for a cup of tea and Lakshmikant informed me that the poli technique college was actually not doing the right thing by trying to get us do a 1 day workshop.
"Linux is not so unimportant that you just do a workshop for the sake of it ! I scolded the management and told them to do the workshop for at least 2 days." Said Lakshmikant who was going to accompany Us to Master Dinanat Mangeshkar (MDM) college of engineering.
Actually the problem was that we had got a call from the poli technique college for a workshop as well but we could not schedule it.
We reached at Aurad in about 90 minits and quickly got ready for the republic day program which had already started in the college campus.
On first look the college looked very simple, nothing as compaired to the one we saw in Konkan.
But the campus is the richest I have ever seen in terms of the gurus it is prowd to have working there. Infact Prathamesh was just telling me on the last day that the students are so lucky that their teachers are encouraging them to learn. They not just follow FOSS as in software but also follow the culture.

about the Python programming workshop

On the first day itself we came to know that The senior faculties out there are pritty serious about Free Software, what we were unsure of was how well will the students participate?
We had been told that students in this part of the state don't open up easily and we might find a tough time initially to get them involved. "They don't start communicating right away" told Manik Shingare who was having a cup of tea with our team.
We knew that this is some thing we always come prepared with but what we saw on the first day in particular really stund all of us.
Meanwhile the lab was setup perfectly by Anusha, Prathamesh and Shantanu despite of several power cuts due to load shedding.
We were going to make participants aware of the python programming language because it is the biggest growing language in Industry in terms of popularity and exceptance.
From Google to NASA and from Nokia to reliance (India) all use python either for every thing or at least for some thing.
We covered python right from its basics till designing User interfaces with Glade and also gave a demo of the Pylons web application framework.
We had devided participants into 2 batches and took 3 days workshop for each group.
Out of our experience we have observed that People tend to understand the basics of python very very quickly provided they are used to indenting their code in c, c++ or java.
Infact we generally manage to get participants to understand datatypes, conditions, loops and functions in a matter of 4 hours (our sessions are around 2 hours each including hands-on ).
The method we adopt is to give small chunks of information including concepts, then demonstrating the examples on the screen and then allowing time for hands-on.
I am blessed with an excelent team of programmers who also know how to teach in a creative way. So generally the entire team would go around the class and check if every one is doing the assignments right.

new experiments and new experiences

On the first day itself we discovered that the information which Prof. Shingare gave us about the student's mindset was absolutely true.
There was hardly any student who was responding to either our questions or our jokes (I tend to make sessions very funny if students are not opening up).
What stund me and Anusha in particular was that girls were slowly starting to participate from the second session of the day, but boys were shying away from answering even "yes " or "no" when we asked if every one is understanding.

The basics of Python went very well, with about 95% participants understanding the concepts and getting the assignments right in the first go. A few students were lagging behind, mostly due to the fact that they never followed the better programming practice of indenting their code in other languages.
Trainners conducting workshops for python should particularly take care of this aspect of Python while teaching. There are indeed many programmers who don't indent their code and as trainners we must make a point to properly explain the analogy. We soon got even those lagging programmers to come up to speed although we had to extend the session by half an hour in the evening.
We wer also going to teach python database connectivity using DBAPI, and generaly choose postgresql as the RDBMS.
Fortunately Participants were very good at SQL, except that they used oracle. Obviously we got the common question which mostly all participants ask, thanks to the brand based education VS concepts. “will Oracle SQL commands work here?” Prathamesh told them to actually practice their regular SQL assignments, including the DDL and DML statements.
Students were obviously happy and surprised that all there select, Insert and update statements worked and so did the create table commands. Once Prathamesh showed them how to use psql prompt, they all practiced SQL. Later on we explained those students the fact that SQL is a standard which all RDBMS follow, no matter free or proprietory.
Amids all this, some thing struck me as well as Anusha and Shantanu. “students are slowly speaking out, but their programming concepts are very week.” Having informed the college administration that we will be teaching Python programming language, we had the basic asumtion that at least students will be knowing programming to an intermediate level. But we have learned one thing, no matter how strict you remain about your pre-requisites, you really can't be sure that 100% participants will fulfill them.
But here the case was even worst. More than 50% students were not communicating for one thing and secondly, they were syntactically good in the language of their choice, but were no good when it came to concepts such as classes. At this point we had decided that we will not go too deep into the language right away and teach them a certain concept when the need arrises. For example, I experimented with the concept of a python package. I did not cover it in my session on python core as planned before, but only touched that topic when we came to things like creating GUI where one module needs to talk with another.
Further details were covered during the pylons hands-on.
Similarly concepts of callback and inheritance were covered in details only when Anusha took up glade and PYGTK.
In short, we only introduced students to certain basic concepts when need arrised and specially when we could show them a real-world example that could create an impact.
For example while many of them already knew VB, we had no trouble explaining what an event is but when Anusha took 3 sessions of Glade, she explained what a callback function is and how it is used to connect a given widget with an event.
This way, students got to see real callback function in action, not just its concept.
The moral of the story is that “teach it when need arises and demonstrate it when application is known “.
Amongst all people Guruji was one personality which took major part of my mindshare during the visit. I was discussing the same concept which I just mentioned with this 80 year old gentleman, and it just took me a few minits to realise that he was the real “teacher “ by flesh and bone as they say.
A person who probably does not even know what programming is or can't even use a computer efficiently for daily work was giving me more suggestions on how to teach programming.
“bring out some examples with rural flaver such as farming and map it to your programming ideas, students will easily pickup.” While this sounds obvious to all of us, many of us will tend to bring out same old examples with slight alterations during such challenging workshops.
He tought me how the sugarcane business works (Not to mention the lovely juice we had at Prasad Patil's farm).
“Give them the example of how they can create a database for farmars and you will see that the students will love it.”, said Guruji and I indeed followed his words.
Anusha went ahead with her glade sessions but to our disappointment, we were informed in the evening that students found the basic event driven form very heavy for practice and many have not picked up the concept.
This apparently happened because we asumed that the students knew event driven UI programming.
No, our asumtion was not completely wrong, just that we should have realised that their story of event ended with “privat sub command1_click() … end sub” of VB and they practically knew nothing about the nuts and bolts of real event driven model.
Again, the brand based education came in our way and also their way.
I had to explain them why we did things the way we did and how important are these concepts.
Never the less, we started the 3rd day (last day for the first batch) with a repeat of GLADE where Anusha patiently gave an overview of what we tought the previous day. This time though, the form was much smaller and we told them to analyse the events in 3 parts.
1, the widget whose event needs attention.
2, which event are we interested in? Meaning we must connect that widget to the event in which we are interested.
3, what should happen if that event happens (and don't use words like fired or executed ) on the concerned widget? Meaning writing a function to have the activity performed.
Thankfully with the change of words in our notes and using a bit non-technical language which sounds kiddish at times, there was no further misunderstandings about the concept of events.
Try explaining the message pump like a real heart and students learn it easily. Compare the try: except: to a bypass surgery and students pick it up.
“look, just like when there is a blockage in heart, the doctor would bypass that part of the artary with an alternative root created by attaching a small part of the artery around the blockage, similarly when there is an error in your code, the course of flow will bypass the remaining part of the try block and take an alternative except path”.

This idea really worked and there were many such small examples we gave them.


On the Final day, after Anusha re-iterated on the event driven programming with pygtk, I took over for the pylons workshop.
I must say, this was the toughest session for me. Fortunately students knew html pritty well, although Prathamesh helped me by conducting a rivision/ test of their concepts.
We found that they were ok with forms and request-response system.
Most of them also knew the http protocol and that it is “stateless”.
I then went on to show them the installation of pylons. We first did a hands-on for setting up the virtual environment and then using easy_install to setup pylons and all its dependencies.
I always believed in doing off-line installation because one can't guarantee that internet will work when it is expected to work.
I had carryed the pylons and its dependent packages in my machine. And easy_install, true to its name makes it realy “easy” to install python packages.
For example I generaly teach students to use the -i argument with easy_install and specify the path to the directory where we have unpacked the pylons archive.
It all worked well and soon students understood the basic idea behind the virtual environment.
We then created a simple project to start with and I had planned to have a small form based database application.
But it took quite a long time for students to understand the Model Vue Control “MVC” architecture and we had to explain it in-dept with some code and after 3 or 4 repeatations, students actually understood the idea.
I think one leson we have learned is that it is vary important to teach the MVC concept in very intricate details if we decide to teach any web application framework.
So from now on we will never keep pylons on the last day of any python programming workshop.
Never the less we indeed wrote an interractive form and managed to explain how things work between a View and Control.
What we could not do as per plan was the Model part of pylons which we planned to show withSQLAlchemy.

Any ways, the second batch started on the very next day.
We were fearing the same kind of situation for the coming batch, or as Shingare suggested may be even worse.
But it was quite the other way round.
The second batch of students was more verbose. Infact they all were responding and specially the girls liked the song I made for the programming assignments,
“python karta hain ye nashila badan, likhna chahe har koi ismay function.” This is a modification of a hit number from a popular film.
This Time we also did a demo of installing Ubuntu. This really worked as we expected and people not just wanted to learn python but also got curious about using Linux in their home computers.
Anusha took the python basics upto functions and I took the Object Oriented Programming.
I have found one way of motivating students, specially for python. I told them “you learned python in record time. Just think of this, it took so many days for you to learn how to write functions in c, but in python you took just 2 hours, because the syntax is clean and presise to the point”.
The rest of the sessions including anusha's glade and pygtk went very well. We were getting much better response and also post session feedback was very positive.
Guruji was even suggesting me that I should actually communicate more in English, because I was talking more in Marathi and Anusha in Hindi.
To my pleasant surprise he told me “it is good to respect our mother tongue, but our students should not spoil their own communication by making this a weekness. Are we expecting that companies coming for campus placements are going to ask questions in marathi?” I am happy that such respectable seniors don't take the traditional ratially discriminating attitude of “English is not ours and we will only speak marathi because we are prowd of it” attitude.
Infact he told me whether they understand or not, first explain the problem in English and avoide talking to them in Marathi unless it is really necessary and if they are really not understanding any thing.
I must say I thoroughly respect this real “guru” and as I said before, its only due to people like him that the college is rich with culture and knowledge.
We also had a paper presentation competition on 1st Feb so had to shift the final day of batch II on 2nd.
Never the less this time pylons sessions went pritty well, although some thing else disturbed us, but we enjoyed it never the less.
Krishna, who also happened to be Anusha's favorite student of the workshop, had organised a small party along with other students for all the resource people.
We had great fun, and the girls, who seemed to be shy in such things were also (finally!) informal with all of us.
We had a realy nice experience and the experiments we conducted tought us a lot. Fortunately we could also share with the students, the repository of what ever little knowledge and experience we had. Students in MDM are quite talented, all that they need is proper mentoring and little motivation.

future plans

I will be going to MDM next week.
On 16th I will visit the college for guess what?
Prof. Shingare is going to provide students a web server for their practicals and also for the project!
He wants to provide this service to the students so that they can even do their assignments or the project work from their home.
I think he is visionary because he knows exactly what is to be done both in short and long run.
What I also suggested him was to apply for the Short Term Trainning Program (STTP) and do a workshop for faculties.
Another major part of my visit was the 3 day evening workshop on GNUKhata. Anusha and Preety did the workshop with college students and local business people.
Those sessions went quite well and a few businessmen actually tried it on their machines. So the happy thing for GNUKhata team was that it dod not stay in just the MDM labs.
We are also taking up some good projects with MDM college students.
One being a small system to collect farming based data and have a database which can be utilised by an expert to give advice to local farmars. They will also be able to bid for selling sugarcane
in the market with the help of this system.
Students liked the Python language very much. Probably it is the result of the pedagogy we have come to develop over last 3 years of conducting such workshops.
And the most important decision which Prof. Shingare took as the HOD was the real success of our workshop.
“I announce that all the final year projects in this college will be done in Python and should be done on GNU/Linux”. Said Shingare at the end of the workshop.
While I did explain him to not base this on just one FOSS based language, he wants to take up python this year as they find it interesting.
Perhaps next year they will take up ruby as well.