Abbas Ali

As mentioned in my earlier post gnuNify was held on Feb 19th and 20th 2010 at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Pune.

Aditya and I had submitted two CFPs each and all of them were selected. My first CFP was a talk on Get going with CakePHP and the second one was a 4 hour workshop on CakePHP. GNUnify was my first ever open source conference and I made sure I am well prepared for my presentations.

We reached Pune on 18th Feb and despite being late night arrival, two SICSR students came to pick us up from the airport. We were accomodated at Symbiosis Vishwabhavan’s guest house which was no less than a star rated hotel. I had both my sessions the next day i.e. 19th Feb.

My first session on 19th Feb was a talk on CakePHP at 11 am. Audiences turned up decently and some of them were very excited to get insight of CakePHP framework. My talk included the introduction to web framework and cakephp, history of cakephp, features and MVC in cakephp. I had designed my slides the way so that I can continue the discussion in the workshop scheduled later that day. I believe people got engaged during my talk and they all were looking forward to attend the workshop. There were some interesting questions after the talk.

The second session, a workshop, started at 3:30 pm and most of the people who were present at the talk turned up for the workshop as well. In the workshop we did the basic blog tutorial along with authentication using the Auth Component and model relationships. It took me more than 4 hours to do it and people liked cakephp so much that they were ready to bake some more models and controllers.

I met some wonderful people like Kushal Das, Vivek Khurana, Arun Khan, Dr.Ajit Kumar, Senthil Kumaran, Baishampayan Ghose, Amit Singh, Gautam Rege, Shantanu Oak and many others. They were all experts in their respective fields and presented some great talks and workshops.

The only thing which concerned me was the low audience turnout for the all the sessions. I think this was because they got divided into different halls as 7 tracks were going on simultaneously.

Here are the slides I presented at the talk…

GNUnify is an annual gathering of the techies. It is organised by the students of the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) in association with the Pune GNU/Linux Users Group (PLUG) to provide a platform for exchange of ideas and knowledge among the industry professionals, students and academia.

This year’s event has been schedule on 19th and 20th Feb 2010. I had submitted two CFPs and both of them have been selected. This will be my first ever gnuNify. In fact this is going to be my first ever public speaking and I am really looking forward to it.

My sessions:

• Talk : Get Going With CakePHP Framework on 19th Feb at 11:30 AM (Room 707)
• Workshop: Rapid Application Development with CakePHP Framework on 19th Feb at 1:30 PM (Lab 207)

Check out the entire list of sessions and the schedule for  19th and 20th Feb 2010. Looking forward to have a wonderful time and meet new exciting people from the open source world.

From my earlier post on shortage of good PHP programmers…

Going with the herd :
And the herd generally opts for Microsoft Technologies. If i see a lot of my friends opting for .NET as a career choice then it will be my natural tendency to go with .NET. Students need to overcome this tendency and move away from herd.

I see this as one of the main reasons why there is a lack of talented PHP Programmers in Nagpur (India). No one is willing to take his/her own decision and choose a programming language other than what their friends are learning. Everyone wants to follow what others are doing. Most of the students don’t even know what a particular programming language does but they join a course to learn it just because their friends are doing that course. They treat programming as fashion and always follow the trend. Guys, please understand that clothes and career are two different things. Be brave enough to take your own decisions.

When I was in college the trend was to go for either VC++ or Java. I did some research and found that C is a good choice to start with. I believe that C lays the foundation of programming syntax and logic. C is like God Father of all languages. I started learning C and got adept at the basics of general programming syntax and logic. I suggest everyone to get acquainted with C before starting their programming careers.

I got a job at SANIsoft, in February 2004, as a PHP Trainee. At the time of joining, I didn’t even knew how to write “echo” in PHP. I then started learning PHP and was trained by Dr.Tarique Sani. Initially I was too tempted to look for a new job and work in technologies like VC++, Java or ASP because that was the trend then. But I thought lets give it a shot and move away from the herd (trend).

Gradually my interest in PHP grew and I started liking it. Back in 2004 very very few people have heard of PHP. When my friends asked me on what technology I am working on – they were shocked on hearing PHP. Almost all of them asked me “What is PHP?”. Some of them even laughed at me for breaking the trend and opting for a language which no one have heard about (at least in Nagpur). But I continued with PHP and today I am glad i stuck with it. The fact is that today I am satisfied with both my work and the money I get.

I believe that world is slowly moving towards web based solutions. Desktop solutions are being replaced by web (Ex: Office suite by Google Docs). And when it comes to web, PHP has many advantages over other server side scripting languages. So be courageous and try to choose a programming language other than M$ technologies.

For the first time in Nagpur, a PHP meetup is being organized on Saturday, 11th July 2009. The entry is free and anyone can come and join the group. All PHP enthusiasts in Nagpur are invited and encouraged to attend the meetup and share their experience working in PHP in particular and web development in general.

You need not be a PHP guru to attend the meetup. In fact any person who is interested in learning PHP can also attend and take the tips directly from PHP gurus. What’s better than to learn form industry people?

Those who are interested in attending the meetup can mark their RSVP on meetup page on facebook (you will need to sign in) or send an email to abbas at sanisoft dot com

Meetup Venue: Jog House, F-40, Tatya Tope Nagar, Behind Tatya Tope Hall
Meetup Date: Saturday, 11 July, 2009
Time: 4 PM to 6 PM

Map:

View meetup location in a larger map

I am happy to announce our new CPG Dev Team Blog. Here is an excerpt from coppermine home page

We started this blog to put forward our experience, knowledge and views on technology, programming and opensource. This blog will highlight coppermine project, its development and features. But hold on, this blog will not be entirely about coppermine and will have topics including php, other opensource applications, world wide web, anything related to technology and sometimes developers and their life.

The authors of the blog will be all team members of cpg. I wish all team members a Happy Blogging!

Well i am late on this. GSoC 2008 ended with the mentor summit held at Google HQ on 25th-26th Oct 2008. I was not able to attend it but two of my fellow team members namely Thu Tu and Sander Weyens made to it. They had a good time there and they interacted with developers of other open source applications.

I was mentoring Nuwan Sameera whose code is now ready to go in coppermine core. His code will bring in some beautiful ajax effects in cpg1.5.x. I hope that the code gets merged into the core soon.

I am now awaiting the summer of code T-Shirt which should have reached me by now. It appears that the tshirt got lost somewhere midway. But no problems as google will be sending a replacement for it. I hope that the replacement reaches me.

Signing off from GSoC 2008 and looking forward to a wonderful summer of 2009.

The other day i was chatting with my team mate Shk.Aziz Poonawalla and he inspired me to do a plugin for coppermine which should convert the uploaded documents (txt, pdf, doc, ppt etc..) to Scribd iPaper format and then display them using the Scribd document viewer.

So i went ahead and created such a plugin for coppermine. The plugin requires PHP 5 and CURL on the server and you should register an account on Scribd Platform to get an API key and secret phrase. After installing the plugin whenever a document is uploaded to cpg – it is copied (uploaded) to scribd server as well (behind the scenes). Scribd converts the document to iPaper format on its server and assigns a document id to it. Now when the document is viewed in cpg, we display the Scribd document viewer and supply it the document id. This displays the document in a nice flash viewer.

For further instructions and to download the plugin please see the forum thread.

The other day i had some free time and thought why not try my hand at converting a wordpress theme to coppermine one. I chose Fieldofsand which is a free wordpress them designed by Smarter Templates and started the conversion. Fortunately i did quite well and published the theme for coppermine community.

You may find quite a few HTML/CSS issues with the theme as i am primarily not a designer but developer. If you are a coppermine user then you might want to check the demo of the theme here. You can download the theme from sourceforge download page.

Coppermine Photo Gallery is again taking part as a mentoring organization in GSoC and i will be mentoring for coppermine organization for the second year straight in a row. It took us around a month to decide on project ideas and students.

Finally on April 21st 2008 the final student allocation list was published by google. I will be mentoring the project called AJAX functionality for core of Coppermine which will be done by Nuwan Sameera Hettiarachchi from Sri Lanka. After the completion of this project coppermine will be an Ajax rich application. Ofcourse every ajax functionality will gracefully degrade if javascript is not supported by the client browser. We intend to put following main features :

• Filmstrip carousel
• Ajax slideshow with transition effects
• New upload form to reduce the number of steps required to upload files
• Ajax sorting of pictures/albums/categories
• And many more cool small features…

The coding period will start on May 26th and will last till August 18th 2008. I am really looking forward for a great summer of code ahead and hope that coppermine interface gets better with student contributions.

Recently i installed Fedora 8 on my machine. All went smoothly and i was able to login to the improved KDE for the first time. But to my disappointment the display was all messed up. Poor colors, fonts etc.. This is what i did to fix it.

First i downloaded the display driver for my motherboard. My configuration was Linux x_86 (Fedora 8), Integrated/Motherboard and ATI Radeon Xpress 200 and i downloaded the driver from here.

The driver installation went on fine and i rebooted the system. But to my surprise that didn’t fixed the problem. After searching and browsing few forums i got the solution. You need to run following command after installing the driver

aticonfig –initial -f

And after restarting X, display got fixed.