Nithin Kamath's Weblog

Tired of seeing the new mail alerts in Thunderbird which is inconsistent with the other alerts in your Ubuntu based system and want to use the Ubuntu’s libnotify based notification system.. Then there is good news for you, there is a project going on which is currently in beta stage which provides a add-on which will display notification messages using the libnotify library which is used in the Ubuntu Notification System. You can find the add-on at Libnotify for Mozilla.

The add-on is more useful if you are like me who has multiple email accounts managed by Thunderbird. Using the native Thunderbird mail alert, it always using to show the details of the first mail account which receives the mail.

For example if I have two mail accounts GMail and Yahoo!, and I receive two mails in my GMail account, it would have shown ‘You have received 2 mails in GMail’, and subsequently when I get a mail in Yahoo! it would have shown the alert ‘You have received 0 mails in GMail’. This is a know bug which has been open for a long time. But when I used this add-on it worked like charm. No issues at all with multiple mail accounts. Thanks to the developers for this add-on.

Get it from : Libnotify for Mozilla

Reservation/Quota! The two words which you will hear a lot in India, where ever you go these are the words you cannot escape. Right from school till you die you will have to live with this, why? Becuase with more and more catagories being created what is left for the so called ‘General’ category is marching towards nill. I would not be surprised if we soon reach a stage where there will be only 5% available to ‘General Category’ and the rest will be reserved for one of the various catagories, in process paving way to ‘Reservation’ based community like in olden times, just the names would be different, now it would be SC/ST/OBC etc.

Let me take the example here, for the BBMP (local) polls here in Bangalore there are 198 wards/seats out of which 127 have some sort of reservation linked to them!! It may be either SC/ST/BC/Women etc, which leaves only a mearge 71 for the ‘General’!! Then there is a news article in today’s paper which tells that the Madras High Court has asked the nationalised banks to promote to officer cadre the people who have joined under the reserved quota. The banks had put forward the point that the promotions should be based on merit cum seniority and not quota, but the HC didn’t fully agree with this. So this bring me to the point “Where are we heading?”

It is not that I am fully against the concept of reserved quota for certain section of the society. I feel it should be only available at max till the end of Graduation, after that there should be no Reservation concept at all. There is no point in giving jobs to people who do not have the required skills by overriding people who have slogged it out and are denied the opportunity just because of the quota system. When this happens the person with skills is discouraged and encouragement is given to people who can under quota get a job even though they are not apt to do the job. I do not say that everyone who get a job under quota do not work properly but a reasonable portion spoil it for all. So at the end everyone suffers, the people are denied proper service and every thing gets delayed.

I think the time had come for India to look forward to a new way to provide opportunities without using the Reservation quota system. But with politician who are here to promote their own selfish desires rather than people causes it looks like a dream that the system would change.

What do you all think about the reservation/quota system in India?

Atul Chitnis introducing Philip Tellis at FOSS.in 2009

The 2009 edition of FOSS.in came to an end yesterday and this was my first experience attending such a big conference. So how was my experince? All I can say is that I was totally blown away by the spirit, dedication and enthusiasm of the people who were a part of FOSS.in. I salute all the people who made FOSS.in such a memorable experience.

For a first timer like me being at such a event can be a bit overwhelming, but thanks to Laxminarayana Kamath I got to meet up with lot of people right from Baiju, Santosh, Debayan, Sham, Tony, Ankur, Deepak, Anil, Hardik, Vignesh and lots more…sorry folks I am not able to mention all your names but I sure remember you.

FOSS.in has lots of talks and workouts, I attended a few of them and to sum them all up I would quote what Philip Tellis had quoted in his ‘Shut up and hack’ keynote “Have Itch, Scratch”, that is what the conference is all about and the tag line of the event ‘Show me the code’ is justified. If you were at the workouts and seen the number of them this year you could have understood what the Itch can do.

One more thing that made this years FOSS.in special and convinient was that it was held at NIMHANS Convention Center with three auditoriums for talks, one whole floor for the workouts – WOW! Thats how it should be.

So I will wrapup this quick writeup on FOSS.in 2009 with a BIG Thank You to the Team FOSS.in for organising such a big event in such a smooth manner.