On this day of love, while people are busy with their significant others, I would like to show and celebrate my love for Free Software. Today is also an international “I love Free Software” – Day.
Free software is not about software, It is about people
The phrase ‘Free Software’, to many people, means ‘software you don’t have to pay for’—but really it’s so much more than that. It’s a way of thinking and working focused on transparency and collaborating with others. It’s about sharing ideas, plans, and developments for the benefit of the commons. I feel that Open source software is not just about Software, it is about Community.
Why i love Free Software?
Freedom! Be free is important, I should be able to manage and shape computer the way I live. It feels amazing to know how they work and what they’re doing. Money matters, but people can’t buy your soul.
All of this is possible only with Free Software, and since I am part of most amazing and friendly community KDE, I couldn’t live without it anymore. That’s a great feeling, and it inspires me to tell others about it. No matter if I have to write a document, do some Physics simulation, solve chemical equations, write software code, create some graphics, or simply enjoy a game or watch a film. Free Softwares are always there with a simple and effective solution for me in any field.
I am more positive and confident than ever. I get to learn something new almost every day. I also got chance to attend Akademy 2012, which is KDE annual conference. It gave me opportunity to meet people in real whom i just knew from the IRC nick. The opportunity to code, interact and share thoughts with highly intelligent and experienced minds was a life changing experience.
Without Free Software, there would be no KDE. I love Free Software because I take care about my Freedom.
KDE Meetup 2013
KDE Meetup is an event for Free Software enthusiasts to meet up, share their knowledge, contribute, learn, play, have fun and create limitless possibilities using Qt and KDE. It is the first large scale open source Meetup in Gujarat and the largest KDE event in India after conf.kde.in in 2011.
If you are in India, Do not miss the opportunity to become a part of the most amazing community.
After years of hard work by Simon team, Simon 0.4.0 is out which is the major release after a long time.
This new version of the open source speech recognition system Simon features a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, a dialog system able to hold whole conversations with the user and more.
You can read about the new release in detail here.
It feels amazing when something you have implemented during Google Summer of code 2012 is part of the release. Also, this was the first time i was part of any release
I know, it is very late for posting about my experience during GSoC 2012 but i do not want to miss this opportunity to share it with you all before this year ends.
GSoC 2012 package
Let me brief you again with my project, it is based on Multimodal Accessibility in which i am using Computer Vision to improve Speech Recognition in Simon. As the major obstacle for command and control speech recognition systems was to differentiate commands from background noise, so in my project i am using the computer vision to determines when to activate / deactivate the sound recognition using visual cues like when the user is actively looking at the screen/robot and is speaking something.
Why i picked up this project in particular?
I came to know about GSoC from our seniors and the learning experiences they got out of it really motivated me to get into this. So i started searching for projects before the organisation list was even announced. Fortunately, i saw this project idea and i really liked the idea. Also, I was working on face detection lately. I also knew from seniors that the KDE is awesome community and Computer vision is one of my favourite fields. I love to work on something which replaces the normal way of using computers and which replaces physical mouse/keyboard. This all factors together droved me completely towards this project and kept me motivated. So i contacted Peter and we discussed about the ideas and it was the first time i stepped onto IRC Then i kept discussing about it on the irc and the mailing list and that’s how it all started
Experience
It has been an incredible learning experience and I’m very happy of the final results. I am more positive and confident than ever. I learnt a lot of basic stuffs like git, makefiles, building, executing and debugging code and much more. This project also acted as a starting point to my contribution to the open source community. It was my first “serious” project with such a big codebase but Simon is nicely documented and with peter’s proper guidance, i was able to adjust very soon.
I also faced many challenges during the period. It was really tough to adhere to the timeline. CMake build system and git was very much new to me. There were many unexpected bugs which surprised me a lot but then it was so much fun figuring it out and fixing it. Also working on UI was time-consuming.
KDE also invited and sponsored me to the Tallinn, Estonia for Akademy 2012 which is their annual conference. It was my first international journey. It gave me opportunity to meet people in real whom i just knew from the irc nick. The opportunity to interact and share thoughts with highly intelligent and experienced minds was a life changing experience, and the biggest takeaway, which would not have been possible without the support of Google, KDE and my mentor.
I also participated in Randa meeting 2012 in Switzerland as a part of KDE Accessibility team. It was my first sprint ever and was really very productive. I implemented vision configuration and solved many bugs there. I would again like to thanks Mario Fux for organizing this fantastic event and all sponsors and donors who made it possible.
End Result
Peter has recorded great video on Context awareness which covers most of the things i have implemented during GSoC 2012.
As you can see clearly in the video, that Simon has turned into multimodel speech recognition system. Simon will deactivate the input devices in absence of the user. This is strikingly similar to the day-to-day communication between humans!
Acknowledgement:
I owe a big part of success to my mentor Peter Grasch for always being there to answer my questions, offer advice and review the code. I have learnt a lot from him and I am sure I have improved a lot as a programmer. The best thing about working with him was that he never really disclosed the solution, instead he gently guided towards the direction of the solution, so I never lost a learning opportunity
And thanks to lots of other people in the community as well whose names I am forgetting. While there I would like to thank my friends keeping up with me when I slept during the day and worked at night.
And more than anything else, I am very happy to make my parents proud after so many years of constant hard work they have put and sacrifices they have made to to chase my dream of becoming a computer engineer. I hope it’s the first of many more proud moments that I will be giving to them in the future.
What’s Next?
I would like to maintain this project after GSoC and continue contributing myself to Simon/KDE. So stay tuned, there is much more to come
To Future GSoC Aspirants:
I would suggest maintaining good communication links with the comunity and trying to be involved with the project as much as possible.
Peter adviced me to first draw the class diagrams before starting my project and it really helped me in the future. I know we all have habit to directly start with coding but i would highly recommend you to have proper structure diagram ready before starting to code, it will give you clear idea about the implementation.
Try to budget a lot of extra time in your project application – most of us are not experienced developers and cannot estimate the amount of work needed for something correctly. Plus, when some additional problems arise (and they will), it’s always better to have time set aside to deal with them. I would highly recommend you to discuss this with your mentor before submitting your proposal.
Finally, Nothing is too hard to accomplish if you love what you do.
My third semester final exams are starting from next week. It is really high time now to start collecting notes from your dear friends. So i have decided to go eco-friendly this year.
Instead of taking xerox of the notes, you can take the images of the notes and then compile them into a single pdf file which is very handy and easy to read.
Go paperless!
If you are using Linux OS, it is pretty easy to accomplish this. Type the following commands in the terminal:
1. Install ImageMagick. If you are on Ubuntu/debian system:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
2. Copy all your images which you want to convert into pdf file in a single directory and then move to that <directory-location>
cd <directory-location-where-your-images-are-located>
3. Enter the following command to convert your images to pdf:
convert * notes.pdf
where notes.pdf is the desired single pdf output file. If you want to compress,
convert -compress jpeg *.jpg notes.pdf
You can also use convert’s option -quality 100 to improve the resulting PDF.
The KDE Randa Meeting is a small gathering of KDE contributors in the beautiful small village Randa in Switzerland. Randa Meeting 2012 will be held from 21 to 27 September 2012. It will includes key KDE projects and top developers, all collaborating concurrently under one roof, isolated from noise and distractions.
I am very excited as it will be the first time that i will be attending Randa meeting and any coding sprint in general. Thanks to Mario Fux for making it possible. This year, it will mark the fourth year of Randa Meeting.
Every previous Randa meeting has been concentrated and productive, generating exceptional results; We really expect even more this year.
This year 4 KDE groups are coming to Randa:
Accessibility
Education
Multimedia/Amarok/Phonon
Plasma
In total, 35 developers will come from all over the world to be at the Randa meeting. In seven inspiring days full of hard work, they will accomplish more than even they can imagine. I am part of KDE Accessibility group of 6 people who are coming together to create an accessibility infrastructure for free software that truly works.
At this sprint we all are volunteers and as you understand there are some hard expenses like accommodation, food and travel. The fundraising goal is €10,000. We have already reached the half way. Please donate whatever you can to make Randa Meeting 2012 possible.
Somehow I had a system crash, after which I was not able to reopen the session I had in KDevelop, I just get an error dialogue saying that it is already open in another running instance. So i was looking at how to rectify it.
So i found out that this is in order to restrict opening many instances of KDevelop. So it create a lock file for the system to realize that we already have started.
One solution to this is to reboot your system (Atleast it worked for me).
Another solution i found out after searching is to delete this file
Randa, Switzerland
Image by: Anne-Marie Mahfouf