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TossConf25 – planning meeting 2 – minutes

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

meeting minutes

2025-04-10

Participants:
Salman
Sakhil
Thanga Ayanar
Shrini

Minutes:

website:
https://tossconf25.kaniyam.com/ is ready.
We can keep updating it once the schedule is being prepared.

We will get volunteers from SJIT college and Payilagam.

We can give the below activities for volunteers –

web site design
logo design
promotion
event organizing
Free Software Demo
GNU/Linux Installation
any other pre conf events like hackathon, game jam, OSM party, packaging party etc.

Student volunteer should colloborate with any GLUG, to do any activities.
volunteer should prepare for a talk on any FOSS sofware.
prepare slides, write a blog, make a video and then show a demo on the conf event or pre/post event.

We can have a panel discussion with all GLUG team.

GLUGs/communities should have a stall to showcase their activities with computer or banner/poster.

Freebies :

For the partipants, we can give free stickers
For the speakers and volunteers, we can print Dhuruvangal book and give it as gift.

Book – 200 Rs/per book
we can print 35 book.
200* 35 = 5000

stickers
18 * 350 = 6300

Total = 11300 INR

events :

  1. mini CTF
    plan for as a last item, if we get time.
    should host on a external server.
  2. Linux Install Fest
  3. FOSS demo stalls
  4. Book sale

Give some gift for all the people who support from collge,
like hall arrangers, cleaners, lab incharge, AV team etc.

Next,
plan for agenda
plan for stickers
plan for book print
plan for cost
plan for registration ( 100 INR min for external participants )

prepare a sheet for all the contacts, action plans and share.

plan to host a online game session for volunteers.
veloren
luanti (minetest)
xonotic
supertuxcart
0ad

Thanga ayanar will check with kalai for other network games.

plan for a OSM event, with all the volunteers.

Let us connect once in two weeks till may end.
then we can meet, weekly once, till the conference.

TossConf25 – planning meeting 2 – minutes

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

meeting minutes

2025-04-10

Participants:
Salman
Sakhil
Thanga Ayanar
Shrini

Minutes:

website:
https://tossconf25.kaniyam.com/ is ready.
We can keep updating it once the schedule is being prepared.

We will get volunteers from SJIT college and Payilagam.

We can give the below activities for volunteers –

web site design
logo design
promotion
event organizing
Free Software Demo
GNU/Linux Installation
any other pre conf events like hackathon, game jam, OSM party, packaging party etc.

Student volunteer should colloborate with any GLUG, to do any activities.
volunteer should prepare for a talk on any FOSS sofware.
prepare slides, write a blog, make a video and then show a demo on the conf event or pre/post event.

We can have a panel discussion with all GLUG team.

GLUGs/communities should have a stall to showcase their activities with computer or banner/poster.

Freebies :

For the partipants, we can give free stickers
For the speakers and volunteers, we can print Dhuruvangal book and give it as gift.

Book – 200 Rs/per book
we can print 35 book.
200* 35 = 5000

stickers
18 * 350 = 6300

Total = 11300 INR

events :

  1. mini CTF
    plan for as a last item, if we get time.
    should host on a external server.
  2. Linux Install Fest
  3. FOSS demo stalls
  4. Book sale

Give some gift for all the people who support from collge,
like hall arrangers, cleaners, lab incharge, AV team etc.

Next,
plan for agenda
plan for stickers
plan for book print
plan for cost
plan for registration ( 100 INR min for external participants )

prepare a sheet for all the contacts, action plans and share.

plan to host a online game session for volunteers.
veloren
luanti (minetest)
xonotic
supertuxcart
0ad

Thanga ayanar will check with kalai for other network games.

plan for a OSM event, with all the volunteers.

Let us connect once in two weeks till may end.
then we can meet, weekly once, till the conference.

quick demo on org2blog

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan
this is a test post to demo org2blog in kanchilug meet, on this special day of “Richard Stallman””s birthday. Explore emacs and start using it. it will be a lifetime editor for you.

quick demo on org2blog

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan
this is a test post to demo org2blog in kanchilug meet, on this special day of “Richard Stallman””s birthday. Explore emacs and start using it. it will be a lifetime editor for you.

Fix – 1:

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

On searching this, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26356268/call-to-undefined-function-imagecreatefromjpeg-and-gd-enabled

found that we have to install gd library of PHP.

we had installed this already in the server as

sudo apt install php-gd

Now, checked the php version.

php -v
PHP 8.1.31 (cli) (built: Nov 21 2024 13:10:15) (NTS)

installed the gd version for it.

sudo apt install php8.1-gd

and restarted apache

sudo systemctl restart apache2

That’s all.

Now, unpublished the catalog. re-uploaded the cover images and published again.

Now, the thumbnails are generated.

But they are too small.

Welcoming Winter with Python – PyKids and PyLadies

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Winter Break for kids

In Canada, we have around 15 days of winter break for all school kids, covering Christmas and New year.

These celebrations are helping much to come out of the winter worries.

Winter is scary word, but people have to go through it, as life has to go on. As we can not travel much and there are no outdoor events/games, we have to be at home, all the days, weeks and months. Organizing indoor events are costly.

To spend the winter actively, many celebrations days are occurring. Halloween, Christmas, Boxing day, New year, Valentine day and more are there, to make the winter active.

Keeping the kids at home for 17 days winter break is tough. We have to engage them whole day. In our apartment, we are conducting many kids events like weekly chess hour, dance hours, board games day, movie time, sleep over nights etc.

Computer Literacy is good here. Kids are learning to use computer at school, from Grade 3 itself. They play many educational games at school. Homework are done with google slides and google docs, from grade 5. Scratch programming also trained here at grade 5. So, they know very well to use computer, read text online, search the internet and gather some info etc.

PyKids

This time, thought of having some tech events for kids. Called for 10 days training as “PyKids”, for grade 5 and above. The announcement was welcomed well by many parents. We had around 17 kids participated.

As our house is empty mostly, ( thanks to Nithya, for the minimalistic life style ), our hall helped for gathering and teaching.

By keeping the hall empty, we are using the place as Daily Zumba dance hall, mini party hall, DJ hall, kids play area and now as a learning place.

Teaching Python for kids is not easy. The kids are not ready to listen to any long talks. They can not even listen to my regular “python introduction” slides. So, jumped into hands-on on the day one itself.

My mentor, Asokan Pichai explained how we have to goto hands-on on any python training, few months ago. Experienced the benefits of it this time.

Even-though, I am using Python for 10+ years, teaching it to kids was really tough. I had to read few books and read on more basics, so that I can explain the building blocks of python with more relevant examples for kids.

The kids are good at asking questions. They share feedback with their eyes itself. It is a huge different on teaching to adults. Most of the adults don’t ask questions. They hesitate to say they don’t understand something. But, kids are brave enough to ask questions and express the feedback immediately.

With a training on 4-6 pm everyday, for around 10 days, we can cover so little of python only.

We practiced the code here – https://github.com/tshrinivasan/python-for-kids We used https://www.online-python.com/ as IDE, as the kids have laptops and tablets with different OS. Will install Python on their laptops on next events so that they can explore more python libraries.

On the final day, my friend Jay Varadharajan, gave a Pizza party for all kids, along with a participation certificate.

Thanks for all the questions kids. Along with you, I learnt a lot. Thanks for all the parents for the great support.

PyLadies

Nithya wanted to try out full day training for her friends. Getting a time of 9-5 to learn something is so luxury for many people. Still, around 10 friends participated.

Nithya took the day with all hands-on. She covered the variables, getting input, if/else, for/while loop, string/list operations. The participants were happy to dive into programming so quickly.

“A byte of Python” is a super easy book to learn python. Read it here for free. https://python.swaroopch.com/

Gave this link as asked to read/practice regularly. Hope they are following the book.

Hall for PyLadies meetup

Home as Learning Space

Thus, we are converting our home as a learning space for kids and friends. Thinking of conducting some technical meetups too. ( I am missing all the Linux Users groups meetings and hackathons). Hope we can get more tech events in the winter and make it so interesting and productive.

Welcoming Winter with Python – PyKids and PyLadies

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Winter Break for kids

In Canada, we have around 15 days of winter break for all school kids, covering Christmas and New year.

These celebrations are helping much to come out of the winter worries.

Winter is scary word, but people have to go through it, as life has to go on. As we can not travel much and there are no outdoor events/games, we have to be at home, all the days, weeks and months. Organizing indoor events are costly.

To spend the winter actively, many celebrations days are occurring. Halloween, Christmas, Boxing day, New year, Valentine day and more are there, to make the winter active.

Keeping the kids at home for 17 days winter break is tough. We have to engage them whole day. In our apartment, we are conducting many kids events like weekly chess hour, dance hours, board games day, movie time, sleep over nights etc.

Computer Literacy is good here. Kids are learning to use computer at school, from Grade 3 itself. They play many educational games at school. Homework are done with google slides and google docs, from grade 5. Scratch programming also trained here at grade 5. So, they know very well to use computer, read text online, search the internet and gather some info etc.

PyKids

This time, thought of having some tech events for kids. Called for 10 days training as “PyKids”, for grade 5 and above. The announcement was welcomed well by many parents. We had around 17 kids participated.

As our house is empty mostly, ( thanks to Nithya, for the minimalistic life style ), our hall helped for gathering and teaching.

By keeping the hall empty, we are using the place as Daily Zumba dance hall, mini party hall, DJ hall, kids play area and now as a learning place.

Teaching Python for kids is not easy. The kids are not ready to listen to any long talks. They can not even listen to my regular “python introduction” slides. So, jumped into hands-on on the day one itself.

My mentor, Asokan Pichai explained how we have to goto hands-on on any python training, few months ago. Experienced the benefits of it this time.

Even-though, I am using Python for 10+ years, teaching it to kids was really tough. I had to read few books and read on more basics, so that I can explain the building blocks of python with more relevant examples for kids.

The kids are good at asking questions. They share feedback with their eyes itself. It is a huge different on teaching to adults. Most of the adults don’t ask questions. They hesitate to say they don’t understand something. But, kids are brave enough to ask questions and express the feedback immediately.

With a training on 4-6 pm everyday, for around 10 days, we can cover so little of python only.

We practiced the code here – https://github.com/tshrinivasan/python-for-kids We used https://www.online-python.com/ as IDE, as the kids have laptops and tablets with different OS. Will install Python on their laptops on next events so that they can explore more python libraries.

On the final day, my friend Jay Varadharajan, gave a Pizza party for all kids, along with a participation certificate.

Thanks for all the questions kids. Along with you, I learnt a lot. Thanks for all the parents for the great support.

PyLadies

Nithya wanted to try out full day training for her friends. Getting a time of 9-5 to learn something is so luxury for many people. Still, around 10 friends participated.

Nithya took the day with all hands-on. She covered the variables, getting input, if/else, for/while loop, string/list operations. The participants were happy to dive into programming so quickly.

“A byte of Python” is a super easy book to learn python. Read it here for free. https://python.swaroopch.com/

Gave this link as asked to read/practice regularly. Hope they are following the book.

Hall for PyLadies meetup

Home as Learning Space

Thus, we are converting our home as a learning space for kids and friends. Thinking of conducting some technical meetups too. ( I am missing all the Linux Users groups meetings and hackathons). Hope we can get more tech events in the winter and make it so interesting and productive.

Kanchi Linux Users Group Monthly Meeting – Dec 08, 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi everyone,
KanchiLUG’s Monthly meet is scheduled as online meeting this week on Sunday, Dec 08, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugMonthlyMeet

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

Talk Details

Talk 0:
Topic : my Elisp ‘load random theme’ function
Description : I wanted to randomly load a theme in Emacs during startup. After i search in online, I achieved this
functionality using Emacs Lisp. this my talk Duration : 10 minutes
Name : Krishna Subramaniyan
About :GNU/Linux and Emacs user 😉

Talk 1:
Topic : PDF generation using python
Description : To demo a python program which will generate a PDF output. Duration : 20 minutes
Name : Sethu
About : Member of KanchiLUG & Kaniyam IRC Channel

Talk 2:
Topic : distrobox – a wrapper on podman/docker
Description : Intro about the tool, why I had to use that and a demo Duration : 15 minutes
Name : Annamalai N
About : a GNU/Linux user

Talk 3:
Topic : Real Time Update Mechanisms (Polling, Long Polling, Server Sent Events)
Description : To demo Real Time Update Mechanisms with JS and Python Duration : 30 minutes
Name :Syed Jafer (parottasalna)
About : Developer. Currently teaching postgres at
https://t.me/parottasalna

After Talks : Q&A, General discussion

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in
Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

Mailing list: kanchilug@freelists.org
Repository : https://gitlab.com/kanchilug
Twitter handle: @kanchilug
Kanchilug Blog : http://kanchilug.wordpress.com

To subscribe/unsubscribe kanchilug mailing list :
http://kanchilug.wordpress.com/join-mailing-list/

Kanchi Linux Users Group Monthly Meeting – Dec 08, 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi everyone,
KanchiLUG’s Monthly meet is scheduled as online meeting this week on Sunday, Dec 08, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugMonthlyMeet

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

Talk Details

Talk 0:
Topic : my Elisp ‘load random theme’ function
Description : I wanted to randomly load a theme in Emacs during startup. After i search in online, I achieved this
functionality using Emacs Lisp. this my talk Duration : 10 minutes
Name : Krishna Subramaniyan
About :GNU/Linux and Emacs user 😉

Talk 1:
Topic : PDF generation using python
Description : To demo a python program which will generate a PDF output. Duration : 20 minutes
Name : Sethu
About : Member of KanchiLUG & Kaniyam IRC Channel

Talk 2:
Topic : distrobox – a wrapper on podman/docker
Description : Intro about the tool, why I had to use that and a demo Duration : 15 minutes
Name : Annamalai N
About : a GNU/Linux user

Talk 3:
Topic : Real Time Update Mechanisms (Polling, Long Polling, Server Sent Events)
Description : To demo Real Time Update Mechanisms with JS and Python Duration : 30 minutes
Name :Syed Jafer (parottasalna)
About : Developer. Currently teaching postgres at
https://t.me/parottasalna

After Talks : Q&A, General discussion

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in
Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

Mailing list: kanchilug@freelists.org
Repository : https://gitlab.com/kanchilug
Twitter handle: @kanchilug
Kanchilug Blog : http://kanchilug.wordpress.com

To subscribe/unsubscribe kanchilug mailing list :
http://kanchilug.wordpress.com/join-mailing-list/

Weekly Notes 48 – 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Christmas Lighting at Niagara

Few weeks ago, Niagara had its Christmas lighting started. Went there with friends. We went there in the evening. Niagara is one of the greatest natural beauty, which we can see a million times. Visited the Casino there. Got 10$ free card and played with few slot machines. Won 3$ and lost all 13$. Though it was a free money, it was tough to stop the game.

Then, visited the wonderful lighting. It was a very long walk, in dark roads, along with glittering lights on the road sides. Kids enjoyed much to see them all.

Few photos are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-niagara-chrismas-lighting

Winter Celebration at Heart Comonos

Last Saturday, we had a grand event to celebrate the winter, organized by HeartComonos team. I volunteered a little amount for the event. We had nearly 2 months of preparation. All the volunteers made the event a memorable one. We had around 300 participants. The Bollywood dance team won all the attention. I had a makeover as ELF and was giving candy to all the kids there.

Few pics of the events are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-welcoming-winter-2024

Daily IRC meetings for open source project mentoring

We are having daily meeting for open source project mentoring. Around 10 people are doing different projects. We are discussing many things like linux, Emacs, productivity, book reviews etc. Read the logs here – https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/kaniyam

2025 planning for kaniyam

Started a thread to plan the 2025 activities for Kaniyam Foundation. Write there what do you think on what we can do next year.

https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/topic/2723/2

Revamping FreeTamilEbooks.com

FreeTamilEbooks.com is with a very old theme for past 10+ years. We need the below changes.

  • Check for new theme
  • improve its SEO for search results.
  • Fix the send2kindle links
  • Fix the categories
  • Merge duplicate author names, categories
  • Fix the download stats
  • Get the detailed download report for all the books
  • have author page
  • have contributor page
  • remove email address on the book’s pages
  • add intro content to all books

Created an project idea issue for this here. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/237

Ravishankar is the founding member of FreeTamilEbooks.com and a mentor for kaniyam. He started to work on these tasks. He gave a new theme and improved the SEO. Need more volunteers to work on other items. Let me know if you can spend few hours for FreeTamilEbooks.com

Winter / Snow started

Today, we got the very first snow fall of the year. It is mesmerizing to see all the green lands are turning into white. For 4 months, we will be in hibernate state. Have to plan many indoor events. I have tons of books to read, tasks to complete.

LLM dataset part 3 released

We are collecting large amount of Tamil text with shareable, open licensed content, for LLM and other research works. So far, collected 1.6 GB of text, from Tamil Wikipedia, FreeTamilEbooks, project madurai, tamilmunn publishers books, etc. Get the data from here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

Read the blog posts on these here

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

part 3 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/11/23/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-3-thamizh_mann-books-project-madurai-wikisource/

Planning for scratch / python training for kids

Around Dec 25 to Jan 5, we will get winter break for schools. I am thinking of teaching python or scratch for kids in this break. Learning scratch for that. The graphics, the colors, drag/drop may be easy for kids. But it is tough for me as a terminal dweller. Yet to think and plan more on the training for kids. At least, I should teach the basics of programming and show a taste of making computers to obey our orders.

Weekly chess hours for kids

Started to teach chess for our condo kids. we conduct a weekly chess hour, to teach and play with other kids. Good to see that many kids know chess already and they all enjoy the game hours.

Moana 2

Watched Moana 2 yesterday. Viyan loved it. It is very difficult to being a part 2 movie as good as part 1. Moana team did a great job on this. Stunning graphics, good story line, nice music, heart melting songs make the move as a wonder. Don’t miss to watch it in theaters.

Books

completed – பேசத் தெரிந்த நிழல்கள் – sramakrishnan. Took it from a local library. It is a book full of review of world movies. Happy to read a physical tamil book apart from 1000s of miles.

In progress – Drupal, LLM, Digital Museums

100% savings on Thanksgiving Day

As usual, got 100% savings on Thanksgiving Day sales. Bought nothing. As we are following minimalism as much as possible, we feel that we have all the things required. I was thinking, if the name of the day is like “Genocide Memorial Day”, we won’t be rushing for shops to get offers and sales. They should rename the day to show the history.

Self-hosted social media – gotosocial

I am running a social media platform on my desktop, and interacting with the world using that. It is a software called ‘Gotosocial’. It is like twitter, but we can install on our own servers. The Fediverse activitypub protocol connects with other millions of such servers around the world.

Hosted it here https://social.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Happy to see many Emacs, FOSS, Linux, Self hosting lovers are there to interact. Getting replies for all the questions I am asking there. It gives much happiness, to be with like-minded people, around the globe.

Weekly Notes 48 – 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Christmas Lighting at Niagara

Few weeks ago, Niagara had its Christmas lighting started. Went there with friends. We went there in the evening. Niagara is one of the greatest natural beauty, which we can see a million times. Visited the Casino there. Got 10$ free card and played with few slot machines. Won 3$ and lost all 13$. Though it was a free money, it was tough to stop the game.

Then, visited the wonderful lighting. It was a very long walk, in dark roads, along with glittering lights on the road sides. Kids enjoyed much to see them all.

Few photos are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-niagara-chrismas-lighting

Winter Celebration at Heart Comonos

Last Saturday, we had a grand event to celebrate the winter, organized by HeartComonos team. I volunteered a little amount for the event. We had nearly 2 months of preparation. All the volunteers made the event a memorable one. We had around 300 participants. The Bollywood dance team won all the attention. I had a makeover as ELF and was giving candy to all the kids there.

Few pics of the events are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-welcoming-winter-2024

Daily IRC meetings for open source project mentoring

We are having daily meeting for open source project mentoring. Around 10 people are doing different projects. We are discussing many things like linux, Emacs, productivity, book reviews etc. Read the logs here – https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/kaniyam

2025 planning for kaniyam

Started a thread to plan the 2025 activities for Kaniyam Foundation. Write there what do you think on what we can do next year.

https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/topic/2723/2

Revamping FreeTamilEbooks.com

FreeTamilEbooks.com is with a very old theme for past 10+ years. We need the below changes.

  • Check for new theme
  • improve its SEO for search results.
  • Fix the send2kindle links
  • Fix the categories
  • Merge duplicate author names, categories
  • Fix the download stats
  • Get the detailed download report for all the books
  • have author page
  • have contributor page
  • remove email address on the book’s pages
  • add intro content to all books

Created an project idea issue for this here. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/237

Ravishankar is the founding member of FreeTamilEbooks.com and a mentor for kaniyam. He started to work on these tasks. He gave a new theme and improved the SEO. Need more volunteers to work on other items. Let me know if you can spend few hours for FreeTamilEbooks.com

Winter / Snow started

Today, we got the very first snow fall of the year. It is mesmerizing to see all the green lands are turning into white. For 4 months, we will be in hibernate state. Have to plan many indoor events. I have tons of books to read, tasks to complete.

LLM dataset part 3 released

We are collecting large amount of Tamil text with shareable, open licensed content, for LLM and other research works. So far, collected 1.6 GB of text, from Tamil Wikipedia, FreeTamilEbooks, project madurai, tamilmunn publishers books, etc. Get the data from here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

Read the blog posts on these here

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

part 3 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/11/23/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-3-thamizh_mann-books-project-madurai-wikisource/

Planning for scratch / python training for kids

Around Dec 25 to Jan 5, we will get winter break for schools. I am thinking of teaching python or scratch for kids in this break. Learning scratch for that. The graphics, the colors, drag/drop may be easy for kids. But it is tough for me as a terminal dweller. Yet to think and plan more on the training for kids. At least, I should teach the basics of programming and show a taste of making computers to obey our orders.

Weekly chess hours for kids

Started to teach chess for our condo kids. we conduct a weekly chess hour, to teach and play with other kids. Good to see that many kids know chess already and they all enjoy the game hours.

Moana 2

Watched Moana 2 yesterday. Viyan loved it. It is very difficult to being a part 2 movie as good as part 1. Moana team did a great job on this. Stunning graphics, good story line, nice music, heart melting songs make the move as a wonder. Don’t miss to watch it in theaters.

Books

completed – பேசத் தெரிந்த நிழல்கள் – sramakrishnan. Took it from a local library. It is a book full of review of world movies. Happy to read a physical tamil book apart from 1000s of miles.

In progress – Drupal, LLM, Digital Museums

100% savings on Thanksgiving Day

As usual, got 100% savings on Thanksgiving Day sales. Bought nothing. As we are following minimalism as much as possible, we feel that we have all the things required. I was thinking, if the name of the day is like “Genocide Memorial Day”, we won’t be rushing for shops to get offers and sales. They should rename the day to show the history.

Self-hosted social media – gotosocial

I am running a social media platform on my desktop, and interacting with the world using that. It is a software called ‘Gotosocial’. It is like twitter, but we can install on our own servers. The Fediverse activitypub protocol connects with other millions of such servers around the world.

Hosted it here https://social.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Happy to see many Emacs, FOSS, Linux, Self hosting lovers are there to interact. Getting replies for all the questions I am asking there. It gives much happiness, to be with like-minded people, around the globe.

Collecting content for LLM dataset – Part 2 – FreeTamilEbooks

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

At FreeTamilEbooks.com we have published 850 ebooks. All in sharable creative commons license. There are many people asking for the text only content of all these books many times. As it is a big task, took long time for it. Thanks to Lenin, Anwar of Kaniyam Foundation, all the contributors, all the writers and readers for making this project alive and a great success.

We are publishing the books as epub format, along with PDF format. Epub is just a zip file of HTML files. So, we can copy all the content from it as unicode text. Pandoc is a wonderful open source software, which can convert an epub to plaintext file.

There are the list of actions we have to do.

  1. Get URLs of all the 850+ epub files
  2. Download them all.
  3. using pandoc, convert to text file.

So far, we dont have a metadata file for all the books published. Getting the links of all epub files need some programming. As Python is a swiss knife to automate anything, started to explore the wordpress REST api with python to get all the books pages content.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/get_Data.py

Wrote the code here to get all the books info.

This gave a JSON file with book name, author, genre, epub, mobi, a4 pdf,6 inch pdf links.

Converted this to a CSV file with the below code. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/parse.py

I had to fix few things manually on the CSV file.

This is the final CSV file. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/fte_metadata.csv

The below code is to download all the epub files from their links in the fte_metadata.csv file. Used pandoc to convert to text.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/create_ebooks/blob/master/get_metadata/get_fte_books.py

Got 845 txt files. Total size is 374 MB

Compressed with 7z to get 47MB compressed file.

Published the data here. https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

Download, share the text data for free. Dont sell them as most of the books are released as CC-BY-NC ( No Commercial ) license.

Use these data to build awesome open source applications and researches like Spellchekers, grammar checkers, LLm, RAG, what not?

Data is always the oil. Let us grow the open data oil.

Please share all your text, audio, video content in sharable license like creative commons. They will use to build a better future.

Collecting content for LLM dataset – Part 3 – Thamizh_Mann books, project madurai, WikiSource

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

We are collecting open licensed dataset in tamil language, to build LLM, and other interesting applications in the coming days.

The ML models we build may have very short lifespan, but the open data will be there forever or at least for longer time than our life time.

Check the efforts part 1 and part 2 here.

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

here goes part 3.

Thamizh_mann publishers are publishing the public domain and nationalized tamil books for many years. Few years ago, with a collaboration with the Library at University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada, and Thamizh_mann publishers, the kaniyam foundation team helped to release all the 1000+ tamil books as PDF and Docx formats for free online.

You can download them all here https://tamil.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/61220/utsc35335

Thanks to UTSC, Thamizh_mann team for the great gift for the tamil Diaspora.

Now, we have 1000+ books in Unicode Docx format. Next is to convert them all as PlainText and use them. Natkeeran and Parathan helped on this.

Along with this, they helped to scrap project madurai books and tamil WikiSource books. They published all in a git repo here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/open_tamil_texts along with the scripts and metadata.

I am adding those text in our open licensed tamil data collection.

Download them all here https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

here is the current size in text format and compressed format.

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h compressed
258M compressed/

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h text-files
355M text-files/project_madurai/data/text
355M text-files/project_madurai/data
355M text-files/project_madurai
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource/data
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource
374M text-files/FreeTamilEbooks-txt
714M text-files/thamizh_mann/data
716M text-files/thamizh_mann
1.6G text-files/

We have 1.6 G of text data to work on LLM or other works.

Go ahead, use it and build more models and tools using this data.

Hope this may not enough to get any good output. But, if we can bring something out of this, even though they are not good, then we can ask people to release their recent contents, blogs, social media posts in creative commons license.

There are few bloggers, magazines are already released their content in CC license. Now, we need your help to scarp them. If you know any programming language and can help for this project, please do webscrapping for the websites mentioned here. share the data and code.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

Thanks for all the content providers and the contributors.

Collecting content for LLM dataset – Part 3 – Thamizh_Mann books, project madurai, WikiSource

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

We are collecting open licensed dataset in tamil language, to build LLM, and other interesting applications in the coming days.

The ML models we build may have very short lifespan, but the open data will be there forever or at least for longer time than our life time.

Check the efforts part 1 and part 2 here.

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

here goes part 3.

Thamizh_mann publishers are publishing the public domain and nationalized tamil books for many years. Few years ago, with a collaboration with the Library at University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada, and Thamizh_mann publishers, the kaniyam foundation team helped to release all the 1000+ tamil books as PDF and Docx formats for free online.

You can download them all here https://tamil.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/61220/utsc35335

Thanks to UTSC, Thamizh_mann team for the great gift for the tamil Diaspora.

Now, we have 1000+ books in Unicode Docx format. Next is to convert them all as PlainText and use them. Natkeeran and Parathan helped on this.

Along with this, they helped to scrap project madurai books and tamil WikiSource books. They published all in a git repo here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/open_tamil_texts along with the scripts and metadata.

I am adding those text in our open licensed tamil data collection.

Download them all here https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

here is the current size in text format and compressed format.

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h compressed
258M compressed/

shrini@dell-optiplex-9100 v/w/h/tamil_datasets> du -h text-files
355M text-files/project_madurai/data/text
355M text-files/project_madurai/data
355M text-files/project_madurai
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource/data
110M text-files/tamil_wikisource
374M text-files/FreeTamilEbooks-txt
714M text-files/thamizh_mann/data
716M text-files/thamizh_mann
1.6G text-files/

We have 1.6 G of text data to work on LLM or other works.

Go ahead, use it and build more models and tools using this data.

Hope this may not enough to get any good output. But, if we can bring something out of this, even though they are not good, then we can ask people to release their recent contents, blogs, social media posts in creative commons license.

There are few bloggers, magazines are already released their content in CC license. Now, we need your help to scarp them. If you know any programming language and can help for this project, please do webscrapping for the websites mentioned here. share the data and code.

https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

Thanks for all the content providers and the contributors.

Introduction to PostgreSQL database – free online course in Tamil

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Introduction to PostgreSQL database – free online course in Tamil

Monday, wednesday, Friday IST evening.

First class – 18-Nov-2024 7-8 PM IST

Syllabus: https://parottasalna.com/postgres-database-syllabus/

Trainer – Syed Jafer – contact.syedjafer@gmail.com

Get the meeting link here

Telegram Group – https://t.me/parottasalna
Whatsapp channel- https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vavu8mF2v1IpaPd9np0s Kaniyam Tech events Calendar – https://kaniyam.com/events/

Introduction to PostgreSQL database – free online course in Tamil

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Introduction to PostgreSQL database – free online course in Tamil

Monday, wednesday, Friday IST evening.

First class – 18-Nov-2024 7-8 PM IST

Syllabus: https://parottasalna.com/postgres-database-syllabus/

Trainer – Syed Jafer – contact.syedjafer@gmail.com

Get the meeting link here

Telegram Group – https://t.me/parottasalna
Whatsapp channel- https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vavu8mF2v1IpaPd9np0s Kaniyam Tech events Calendar – https://kaniyam.com/events/

kanchilug – Monthly Meeting – Nov 10, 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi everyone,
KanchiLUG’s Monthly meet is scheduled as online meeting this week on Sunday, Nov 10, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugMonthlyMeet

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

Talk Details

Talk 0:
Topic : Postgres Architecture
Description : In this talk, we will explore the architecture of postgres Duration : 30 mins
Name : Sethupandian
About : My name is Sethu and I work as a practice manager for an Insurance company in Canada. Back in India, I am from Salem. Completed my engineering in Electrical & Electronics, at Kongu Engineering College(2000-2004). Started my IT career in the year 2005 and worked in companies like Ramco Systems, Verizon, TCS, Cognizant before joining my current employer. I have always got an interest towards learning things that is fascinating. And through Payilagam and Muthu sir, I came to know about Kaniyam and KanchiLUG. I am happy to be part of this great initiative. I wish and hope I can contribute whatever possible from my side.

Talk 1:
Topic : Intro to GDB
Description : Based on my recent translation of Beej’s guide to Tamil on same. Duration : 20 mins
Name : Annamalai N
About : a GNU/Linux user interested in Embedded Systems. Final year engineering undergrad.

After Talks : Q&A, General discussion

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in
Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

kanchilug – Monthly Meeting – Nov 10, 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi everyone,
KanchiLUG’s Monthly meet is scheduled as online meeting this week on Sunday, Nov 10, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugMonthlyMeet

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

Talk Details

Talk 0:
Topic : Postgres Architecture
Description : In this talk, we will explore the architecture of postgres Duration : 30 mins
Name : Sethupandian
About : My name is Sethu and I work as a practice manager for an Insurance company in Canada. Back in India, I am from Salem. Completed my engineering in Electrical & Electronics, at Kongu Engineering College(2000-2004). Started my IT career in the year 2005 and worked in companies like Ramco Systems, Verizon, TCS, Cognizant before joining my current employer. I have always got an interest towards learning things that is fascinating. And through Payilagam and Muthu sir, I came to know about Kaniyam and KanchiLUG. I am happy to be part of this great initiative. I wish and hope I can contribute whatever possible from my side.

Talk 1:
Topic : Intro to GDB
Description : Based on my recent translation of Beej’s guide to Tamil on same. Duration : 20 mins
Name : Annamalai N
About : a GNU/Linux user interested in Embedded Systems. Final year engineering undergrad.

After Talks : Q&A, General discussion

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in
Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

Weekly Notes 44 – 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

  • For the past few months, I was preparing for an English Exam called CELPIP. It is an exam to check the Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Though we know English, preparing for an exam is an exhausting one. We took online training from “Galaxy Training Academy“. https://galaxytraining.in The coach “Jay Kumar” gave nice intro about exam pattern. He gave many mock tests and gave good feedback on how to improve, on each test. Last month, Nithya and I cleared the exam. It is a good feel to released from exam fear. Postponed many activities because of the exam preparation. Will roll out them all soon. If you are preparing for any English Exam, I suggest taking training and mock tests with “Galaxy Training Academy”.

    ——

  • In Canada, Daylight saving ended yesterday. This happens every year in fall season and referred as “Fallback”. The clocks are moved one hour back. This is to adjust the dark winter season. It seems like all in a sudden, we got one hour extra to sleep in morning. 🙂

    ——

  • On Oct 31, we had Deepavali, Halloween and our Marriage day. Deepavali day went with great remembering our childhood memories. The evening was filled with fun, as we went to neighbourhood houses, with friends and kids, to play “Trick or Treat”. Saw many weird, spooky decorated houses and people. Kids collected a bag full of chocolates. Last year, it was too cold. This year, the same day had a nice weather, to roam around in the evening.

    ——

  • On Nov 1, we celebrated Deepavali with firing crackers. Bought a few crackers, which emit light. Here, we don’t get loud-full crackers like atom bombs, 1000 piece fireworks shots etc. With limited available crackers, kids enjoyed firing them, with all their friends together.

    ——

  • On Nov 8, we are planning for a mega Deepavali event with around 250 people here. I am contributing on the planning/photography. Nithya and kids are practicing dance with their friends. Hope it will be a fun-filled evening.


    ——

  • On Nov 2, gave a talk on tolkappiyam Canada monthly meeting, about our efforts on writing python code for tamil grammar rules in Tolkappiyam book. It was a good meeting. Few of the participants accepted to collaborate. You can read our progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214


    ——

  • Few weeks ago, gave a talk on open-tamil python library, at Kanchi Linux Users Group ( KanchiLUG) meet. Video is here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtIrbvw2V-w


    ——

  • Kids started going to tamil school on every Saturday morning. This week, they received books. Viyan is good at Tamil and English. Iyal started to read Tamil and English. Paari is trying to learn writing.

    ——

  • We conduct daily meetings in a text based chat system called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). daily, 7-8 pm IST. Good to see many people are joining and discussing many things about open source software and mentoring to contribute to open source software. More details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/open-source-projects-mentoring-via-irc/

    ——

  • Practicing Manual mode in photography for few weeks. Feeling like learning linux and Emacs. It gives the most flexible options and results are stunning. It is better to learn it in early days, so that we can do more magics with lighting.


    ——


    The one thing I follow in photography is – shoot a lot, share a little. I keep and share only 10%. All others are deleted. Though it is hard to select the best photos, sharing only 10% is easy for viewers and brings a Wow from them.


    ——
  • Completed reading books in last week.
  • currently reading these books.

Weekly Notes 44 – 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

  • For the past few months, I was preparing for an English Exam called CELPIP. It is an exam to check the Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Though we know English, preparing for an exam is an exhausting one. We took online training from “Galaxy Training Academy“. https://galaxytraining.in The coach “Jay Kumar” gave nice intro about exam pattern. He gave many mock tests and gave good feedback on how to improve, on each test. Last month, Nithya and I cleared the exam. It is a good feel to released from exam fear. Postponed many activities because of the exam preparation. Will roll out them all soon. If you are preparing for any English Exam, I suggest taking training and mock tests with “Galaxy Training Academy”.

    ——

  • In Canada, Daylight saving ended yesterday. This happens every year in fall season and referred as “Fallback”. The clocks are moved one hour back. This is to adjust the dark winter season. It seems like all in a sudden, we got one hour extra to sleep in morning. 🙂

    ——

  • On Oct 31, we had Deepavali, Halloween and our Marriage day. Deepavali day went with great remembering our childhood memories. The evening was filled with fun, as we went to neighbourhood houses, with friends and kids, to play “Trick or Treat”. Saw many weird, spooky decorated houses and people. Kids collected a bag full of chocolates. Last year, it was too cold. This year, the same day had a nice weather, to roam around in the evening.

    ——

  • On Nov 1, we celebrated Deepavali with firing crackers. Bought a few crackers, which emit light. Here, we don’t get loud-full crackers like atom bombs, 1000 piece fireworks shots etc. With limited available crackers, kids enjoyed firing them, with all their friends together.

    ——

  • On Nov 8, we are planning for a mega Deepavali event with around 250 people here. I am contributing on the planning/photography. Nithya and kids are practicing dance with their friends. Hope it will be a fun-filled evening.


    ——

  • On Nov 2, gave a talk on tolkappiyam Canada monthly meeting, about our efforts on writing python code for tamil grammar rules in Tolkappiyam book. It was a good meeting. Few of the participants accepted to collaborate. You can read our progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214


    ——

  • Few weeks ago, gave a talk on open-tamil python library, at Kanchi Linux Users Group ( KanchiLUG) meet. Video is here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtIrbvw2V-w


    ——

  • Kids started going to tamil school on every Saturday morning. This week, they received books. Viyan is good at Tamil and English. Iyal started to read Tamil and English. Paari is trying to learn writing.

    ——

  • We conduct daily meetings in a text based chat system called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). daily, 7-8 pm IST. Good to see many people are joining and discussing many things about open source software and mentoring to contribute to open source software. More details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/open-source-projects-mentoring-via-irc/

    ——

  • Practicing Manual mode in photography for few weeks. Feeling like learning linux and Emacs. It gives the most flexible options and results are stunning. It is better to learn it in early days, so that we can do more magics with lighting.


    ——


    The one thing I follow in photography is – shoot a lot, share a little. I keep and share only 10%. All others are deleted. Though it is hard to select the best photos, sharing only 10% is easy for viewers and brings a Wow from them.


    ——
  • Completed reading books in last week.
  • currently reading these books.

Open Source projects mentoring via IRC

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

In the programming world, if you say as ‘ I prefer watching videos, than reading docs’ it means you are a programmer already or you won’t become a programmer.

Do you feel that you are struggling to be a good programmer, even after watching 100s of hours of videos?

Let me share one secret. It is the fear of reading and writing PlainText. The more you go away from reading and writing, programming will go away from you.

Programming is all about dealing with the code, error messages, log files, documentation. All in PlainText. We have emails, tickets, docs, reports too there on the stack of IT life.

If you love terminal and PlainText tools, you are already into reading and writing. The more you read and write, the more you can get clarity in thinking, which is the essential part of programming.

To embrace the simplicity and powers of PlainText, few friends started to discuss in IRC. yes, the same 40+ years old Internet Relay Chat, an chat system which built the internet itself via chat.

Thanks to Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai, KanchiLUG, Kaniyam Foundation friends for joining the chat.

Read my post on why I like IRC here https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/why-i-like-irc-internet-relay-chat-even-in-2020/

Here is small video in Tamil by my friend Muthuramalingam of Payilagam – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGurYNb0BM8

From today, 7-8 IST evenings, we can discuss at channel at irc.libera.chat

I suggest a terminal based chat client “weechat”

But, for a quick connection, use this link to join and discuss. https://web.libera.chat/gamja/#kaniyam

Start Date – 21 Oct 2024 ( Monday to Friday )
Time – 7-8 pm IST
server – irc.libera.chat
channel –

read the chat logs here – https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/kaniyam

join and say something about you.

  • feel like a hacker by chatting with people in your linux terminal
  • get mentored on hactoberfest
  • ask any questions on linux/python/programming/devops
  • share your daily progress on learning and programming
  • practice reading and writing PlainText
  • learn slowly and strongly

See you at IRC.

If you are interested in mentoring students for open source projects, please join and start the discussions.

The other interesting channels that people chat are #ubuntu  you can join there and participate on the discussions anytime.

Open Source projects mentoring via IRC

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

In the programming world, if you say as ‘ I prefer watching videos, than reading docs’ it means you are a programmer already or you won’t become a programmer.

Do you feel that you are struggling to be a good programmer, even after watching 100s of hours of videos?

Let me share one secret. It is the fear of reading and writing PlainText. The more you go away from reading and writing, programming will go away from you.

Programming is all about dealing with the code, error messages, log files, documentation. All in PlainText. We have emails, tickets, docs, reports too there on the stack of IT life.

If you love terminal and PlainText tools, you are already into reading and writing. The more you read and write, the more you can get clarity in thinking, which is the essential part of programming.

To embrace the simplicity and powers of PlainText, few friends started to discuss in IRC. yes, the same 40+ years old Internet Relay Chat, an chat system which built the internet itself via chat.

Thanks to Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai, KanchiLUG, Kaniyam Foundation friends for joining the chat.

Read my post on why I like IRC here https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/why-i-like-irc-internet-relay-chat-even-in-2020/

Here is small video in Tamil by my friend Muthuramalingam of Payilagam – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGurYNb0BM8

From today, 7-8 IST evenings, we can discuss at #kaniyam channel at irc.libera.chat

I suggest a terminal based chat client “weechat”

But, for a quick connection, use this link to join and discuss. https://web.libera.chat/gamja/#kaniyam

Start Date – 21 Oct 2024 ( Monday to Friday )
Time – 7-8 pm IST
server – irc.libera.chat
channel – #kaniyam

read the chat logs here – https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/kaniyam

join and say something about you.

  • feel like a hacker by chatting with people in your linux terminal
  • get mentored on hactoberfest
  • ask any questions on linux/python/programming/devops
  • share your daily progress on learning and programming
  • practice reading and writing PlainText
  • learn slowly and strongly

See you at IRC.

If you are interested in mentoring students for open source projects, please join and start the discussions.

The other interesting channels that people chat are #ilugc #dgplug #emacs #kde #ubuntu  you can join there and participate on the discussions anytime.

kanchilug Weekly Discussion – Oct 20 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi everyone,
This week in KanchiLUG we have scheduled an weekly discussion as online meeting on Sunday, Oct 20, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugWeeklyDiscussion

We also hava talk scheduled as well

Talk Details:
Talk 0:
Topic: Introduction to open-tamil python library
Duration: 30 mins
Speaker: Shrinivasan T
About speaker: A Linux Lover. Editor of free software magazine in Tamil http://kaniyam.com
Ebooks Publisher at http://FreeTamilEbooks.com
Founder – Kaniyam Foundation

Weekly discussion is an open and friendly discussion where topics related to Linux/FOSS technologies will be discussed. We will meet in the online jitsi meeting and discuss new linux things everyone explored this week and we chat about linux news and topics. If you are facing any issues with linux or any FOSS applications, you can also share your issues during the discussion. Our KanchiLUG community will help to debug or suggest some good alternatives.

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

Why I like IRC – Internet Relay Chat – even in 2020?

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

IRC – Internet Relay Chat – is a text based chat program. The 2k kids may compare this to slack, telegram chat, whatapp chat or any other instant messaging.

IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988. Wow. Too old, Right?

Why it is not famous nowadays? People are telling that there are many cons compared to modern instant messaging.

These cons are real Pros of IRC. They are not bugs. They are the intended features.

Are you hearing the word IRC for the first time? Here is a quick beginners guide

https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/irc-primer/

IRC is only Text Based Chat.

Yes. You can not add any image or video. Few servers accept file uploads. Still Text is the only preferred way of communication in IRC. Why?

  • Plain Text is the God of content, always.
  • It is searchable.
  • Anyone can read faster
  • Watching a one hour video will talk one hour time. Reading its transcription will take quarter of its time.
  • On server side maintenance, it will be great headache to keep on adding the storage to keep all the images, files, videos. Ask the admins, who manages RocketChat, Mattermost, Mastodon Instances. They will tell the pains of keep on increasing the hard disk spaces. The IRC server admins will live a peacefull life and can keep the history for decades.
  • If you can not explain anything on text, even videos wont help for many.

IRC is not keeping the history of chats

IRC simulates the realtime chatroom like a meeting room. If you are late to a meeting room, you miss the spoken things. You can read minutes and know what was spoken.

Similarly, IRC is only realtime chat. You can not read the previous chats like you do in telegram like instant messengers. Even in modern we dont read all the history of chats. Imagine, in a morning, a chat room having 200 unread message. What do you do? Just skip all the messages and mark them read. Thats life. IRC knew this 30 ago.

What If I want history?

As all the interaction is happening as plain text, anyone can share the chat history online as blogpost, pastebin or github gist. Ask any fellow mates to export them and read in leisure.

That’s too much work for me to ask for a chat history

Well. There are bots and bots and bots for IRC. Check for any logging bot and add to your channel. Host the bot yourself or use this bot.   https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/  Add this bot to your channel and read all the chatlog on their website.

Who are using IRC still?

Most of the Free/Open Source software are having IRC Channels to provide free support. You can interact with the original developers of the software there. Anyone can create a channel, invite friends, hangout and have fun there.

Rules, Rules, Rules

It seems there are few rules to chat in IRC Channels. It depends on each channel. To maintain  goodness, there are rules everywhere. Even in Roads, to avoid accidents, we have to follow rules. There are mailing list rules. Similarly, there are common IRC Rules. Read here for common IRC meeting Rules https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_IRC#Meeting_Protocol

There are many commands to learn

Yes. As everything is via only text, we have to give few commands to use the IRC. There are no “Join/Mute/Leave/Kick” buttons. They are just commands. Check your instant messenger GUI. You will be clicking so many buttons to interact. They are the original commands here.

I have to remember people by there NickName. Why cant we connect with their phone number?

Welcome to the world of Privacy. By giving all your contact’s phone numbers to your instant messenger like WhatsApp, you are selling all our privacy. Do you get frequent SPAM phone calls from all banks,credit cards? We did not get these on IRC times. IRC keeps all your privacy. You dont have to reveal your name, sex, country.

What if I want to chat with someone instantly? He is not there in the IRC Channel? In instant messenger, I leave him a message, on next day, he will see and reply.

IRC respects your offline life. You dont need to be online 24/7. IRC is like going to office and being in a meeting room. Are you in meeting room or a tea shop gang or friends gathering 24/7 ? How are you connecting with them when they are not around? Yes. You make calls or send a message. You choose another medium to connect with them and wait. Do the same here. If you have some query. Posted in IRC. No one replies or the persons who can reply are not there in the Channel. Then ask the same on respective mailing list or stackoverflow like forums. Check the IRC logs next day, you might got answers. You can quickly search over text to get your conversations.

If someone is not there online, it seems he is enjoying life in realtime. Let them enjoy it. Ask for their available time and interact only on that time.

Meet.Jit.si, BigBlueButton,Zoom, Skype, Facebook Live, YouTube Live are useful to meet people, discuss and for any training. Can we do the same on IRC?

Yes. We can do all the things in IRC too. There are tons and tons of training happening over IRC. DPGLug is conducting Training on Free Software from 2009 on every summer. You can read all the logs here https://dgplug.org/irclogs/

We had monthly IRC meetings on Tamil Computing around 2015. You can read all the logs here  https://tamilirc.wordpress.com/

Anyone can read/skim these logs quickly. If I share a youtube channel or podcasts full of 100s of hours of content, how long will you watch? It depends on the need. The same applies for IRC also. But it easy and quick to read text.

Can I use IRC on the go with Mobile?

Yes. There are many mobile clients. IRCCloud’s web client and mobile client are modern and neat. I use their free plan. There are tons of clients available for all OS. Explore and find your lovable pair, yourself.

What if I want to read all the history?

You can setup IRC bouncer software like ZNC, or connect with a matrix channel or pay for IRCCloud.com like services. https://thelounge.chat/ seems a better self hostable IRC web client. Install it in a server or raspberry pi. If you want to be away from propitiatory software, for which you are the product, you have to host yourself or pay to some service providers. Or simply enable a free logging bot and read from their website.

I can talk faster than typing.

But people can read faster than hearing or seeing any video. If you want to reach more people, type the content in IRC or a blog post.

What about Matrix/Riot?

Matrix/Riot.im seems a upgraded IRC with all the bells and whistles of other instant messengers. They can be connected with IRC using bots. To and Fro both way communications are seamless. But it allows multimedia content, exporting all the content for public view is still tough, high maintenance tasks for server admins.

Want to discuss with 1000s of people same time? Use IRC

All the modern video chat services, YouTube, Facebook Live sessions take high bandwidth. Not everyone on the world have the bandwidth to connect with a video chat. Most of the video calls are spending time with “Am I audible? Do you see my screen? I can not see the screen. Stop the Noice” etc like discussions.

We dont have a 100s of people participating free video call service yet. You have to pay a lot for Zoom like services, just to hear the above voices and see blur faces of participants.

Instead, call for a meeting over IRC. Follow few meeting guidelines and all the meeting is done with low noise. Even anyone can connect with 2G or below bandwidth network.

Ok.Ok.Ok Stop this marketing for IRC

Few final thoughts.

  1. IRC server is self hostable. irc.libera.chat, irc.oftc.net are few major free servers available to create a channel
  2. Respect other people’s time. Video calls take all the participants time. Text chats are quick and respecting time.
  3. Text chat is very minimalist. Enjoy the peacefulness of a IRC meeting.
  4. Not all trainings need a video chat. If something is really important to demonstrate as a video, record a screencast, upload online and ask all to watch.
  5. Text is great way to learn things. Remember, we still use text books, tutorials, documentation, wikipedia to learn many things. Videos can help only as supporting materials.

I will be available at #ilugc and #kaniyam at irc.libera.chat on weekdays on daytimes.

I will plan for few text based training on any free software and announce here soon.

Thanks to ShakthiKannan, Mohan of Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai and Kushal of DGPLug for inspiring me on using IRC.

Add your comments or experience with IRC here.

kanchilug Weekly Discussion – Oct 20 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi everyone,
This week in KanchiLUG we have scheduled an weekly discussion as online meeting on Sunday, Oct 20, 2024 17:00 – 18:00 IST

Meeting link : https://meet.jit.si/KanchiLugWeeklyDiscussion

We also hava talk scheduled as well

Talk Details:
Talk 0:
Topic: Introduction to open-tamil python library
Duration: 30 mins
Speaker: Shrinivasan T
About speaker: A Linux Lover. Editor of free software magazine in Tamil http://kaniyam.com
Ebooks Publisher at http://FreeTamilEbooks.com
Founder – Kaniyam Foundation

Weekly discussion is an open and friendly discussion where topics related to Linux/FOSS technologies will be discussed. We will meet in the online jitsi meeting and discuss new linux things everyone explored this week and we chat about linux news and topics. If you are facing any issues with linux or any FOSS applications, you can also share your issues during the discussion. Our KanchiLUG community will help to debug or suggest some good alternatives.

Can join with any browser or JitSi android app.
All the Discussions are in Tamil.

About KanchiLUG : Kanchi Linux Users Group [ KanchiLUG ] has been spreading awareness on Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) in Kanchipuram since November 2006.

Anyone can join! (Entry is free)
Everyone is welcome
Feel free to share this to your friends

Hacktoberfest 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hacktoberfest 2024 is just around the corner, and I hope you’re as excited as I am for this month-long celebration of all things open-source!

If you’re looking for beginner-friendly open-source projects to contribute to, we’ve got you covered. The Kaniyam Foundation Team has compiled a list of project ideas that you can take on and make your own. A special thanks to KanchiLug volunteer Syed Jaffer for putting together this list of projects to work on. Check it out at the link below:

https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/hacktoberfest-2024-project-lists/

If you need any open source project to be developed, share your project idea in detail here.
https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues

Register here – https://hacktoberfest.com/

#Hacktoberfest #Hacktoberfest2024

Chennaipy – September meetup

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the September month meetup.

# Schedule

* AI in Digital marketing
* Novice with Metaprogramming — Decorates with Decorator
* Best practices in optimizing large scale data processing using pandas-like libraries
* Transforming Automotive Electronics Testing with Python and Robot Framework * Lightning Talks (10 mins/talk)

# Venue

Zilogic Systems
Development Centre I
2nd Floor, Ragula Tech Park,
Type II/16, Dr. VSI Estate (Phase 1),
Thiruvanmiyur,
Chennai – 600 041.

Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/S1ndF1EzHdTLz2or6

* RSVP to get the meeting link
https://www.meetup.com/chennaipy/events/303192601

# Date & Time

* 28/09/2024
* 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM

# New to Python ?

* Learn Python in 30 minutes
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/

* How to think like a computer
Scientist?

http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/

Chennaipy mailing list
Chennaipy@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chennaipy

Hacktoberfest 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hacktoberfest 2024 is just around the corner, and I hope you’re as excited as I am for this month-long celebration of all things open-source!

If you’re looking for beginner-friendly open-source projects to contribute to, we’ve got you covered. The Kaniyam Foundation Team has compiled a list of project ideas that you can take on and make your own. A special thanks to KanchiLug volunteer Syed Jaffer for putting together this list of projects to work on. Check it out at the link below:

https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/hacktoberfest-2024-project-lists/

If you need any open source project to be developed, share your project idea in detail here.
https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues

Register here – https://hacktoberfest.com/

#Hacktoberfest #Hacktoberfest2024

Chennaipy – September meetup

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the September month meetup.

# Schedule

* AI in Digital marketing
* Novice with Metaprogramming — Decorates with Decorator
* Best practices in optimizing large scale data processing using pandas-like libraries
* Transforming Automotive Electronics Testing with Python and Robot Framework * Lightning Talks (10 mins/talk)

# Venue

Zilogic Systems
Development Centre I
2nd Floor, Ragula Tech Park,
Type II/16, Dr. VSI Estate (Phase 1),
Thiruvanmiyur,
Chennai – 600 041.

Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/S1ndF1EzHdTLz2or6

* RSVP to get the meeting link
https://www.meetup.com/chennaipy/events/303192601

# Date & Time

* 28/09/2024
* 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM

# New to Python ?

* Learn Python in 30 minutes
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/

* How to think like a computer
Scientist?

http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/

Chennaipy mailing list
Chennaipy@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chennaipy

Weekly Notes 38 – 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Busy Summer

I missed writing weekly notes for last few months. Just capturing few memorable activities in past few months.

We had a super busy summer in Canada. All the weekends were filled with some event/gathering/viewing places etc. High Park, Harbour Front, Toronto Zoo, Wonderland, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada Exhibition at Toronto, Central Island, few libraries, few book release events, literature meetups are the key places we visited. There were tons of fun events for kids and adults. Mississauga government conducted free play based activities for entire summer. We sent our kids there on all weekdays. It helped a lot to make the kids busy in summer.

Finally, school started for kids last week. Kids are going to new school, this year, as we moved to a new house. Here, schools are allocated based on the living address. We moved to the next street, just some 800m away. Still have to goto another school. Slowly, kids started to go along with the new school.

Tolkappiyam Conference

Tolkappiyam is one of the oldest grammar rule book for Tamil language. it was from several centuries ago. The beauty of the Tamil language is still those old rules are followed mostly. This book is being read, interpreted, understood, explained, practised generations by generations, in all the countries where Tamil people live.

In Canada, we have a conference on Tolkappiyam, next weekend. https://www.tolkappiyam.ca/

I am volunteering on the conference days. Along with Prof. Sathyaraj, presenting a research paper too.

Writing python code for Tolkappiyam grammar rules

Prof. Sathyaraj, Boopalan, kamalakannan, Parameswar, myself and few more people meet every Saturday. We discuss the rules and write them as python code. In a year or so, we hope that we can build a better open source grammar rule engine for tamil in Python.

Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214

Code – https://gitlab.com/boopalan-dev/tamilrulepy

A Tamil professor (Sathyaraj), A math student (Boopalan), An Instrumentation Engineer ( hehe. its me ), A mechanical Engineer(Parameswar) are contributing to Tamil grammar rules in Python is the awesome moments in my life.

After our recent python classes, Tamil professor Sathyaraj writes good code and validates our code quickly.

New website – Kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com

Recently, Tamilnadu government release all the works of former CM Kalaignar Karunanithi, in Public Domain License. It was a long time ask for many readers. Thanks to Tamilnadu government for such great decision. On this year death anniversary, 7 August 2024, we collected few of his books in PDF format and published as a separate website for quick access. Check here https://kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com Completed converting them all to text using automated google OCR ( Thanks to python ).

Sent few books in text format to a publisher for proofreading. Soon, we will get them as print and free ebook in epub, mobi formats too.

Python course completion

We conducted a 2-month online free python course in Tamil. My friend Syed Jafer handled the classes. It was a weekly 3-hour training. Python is a crowd puller. We got some 3500 members in 3 whatsapp groups. 1000+ joined for initial classes. Around 50 people completed the course successfully. Many participants wrote good blogs. We can read all their blogs here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Thanks to Syed for the good classes, Asokan and TalentSprint.com for donating Zoom, and all participants for great enthusiasm. Read my closing notes here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/closing-notes-on-2-months-online-python-course/

Contributions from python class students

Many students started doing good projects. Scrapping, Tamil NLP, and more. We have good project ideas to contribute here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues

Happy to see the students pick some real projects and start contributing to them.

Explore ML – mini crash course

At the Python course, many asked questions on ML. Wanted to give some intro about ML. My friend Dr.Tamilarasan came forward to give some quick intro on ML. It was a 3 day ( 5 hours ) discussion exploring the basics of ML.

Thanks to Dr.Tamilarasan and participants for the nice discussions.

Docker course started

Syed started his next free course. This time the topic is Docker. Get more details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/15/free-online-training-on-docker-in-tamil/

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Chennai

Many FOSS communities jointly celebrate Software Freedom Day in Chennai on Sep 21 2024. If you are in Chennai, buy a ticket here – https://fossunited.org/events/sfd Don’t miss meeting awesome people in Chennai.

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Karaikudi

Kaniyam Foundation team is celebrating software freedom day in Karaikudi. Will share more details soon.

With all friends from free software communities, I always feel like having 100 heads and 200 hands. We all are dreaming same thing at same time and implement all our dreams together. Thanks to all free/open source contributors. You all make the world a better place to live.

Heartcomonos planning meet

HeartComonons is a Non Profit Social organization in my area in Mississauga, Canada. We attend/volunteer for their events as family. Last week, we had a planning meet for next 3 year goals. The brainstorming session was good. Learned many things on how to think as an organization.

Manual Mode in Photography

I was hesitant to learn Linux for many years. Postponed learning Emacs for around 15 years. But, living with Linux for past 20 years and with Emacs for past 3 years. Similarly, I was too lazy to learn Manual Mode in Camera for many years. I just Don’t wanted to miss any good moments, while changing the options in Camera. But, recently, started to play with it. Oh, Man!. It can do magics with the lighting. We can get better outputs, if we can control what goes into the camera with all the manual mode options. I have a huge pile of photos, waiting to upload in Wikimedia commons, so that anyone can use them freely. Keeping this for winter days.

My podcast with MalaiKannan

Recenly, I had a detailed discussion with MalaiKannan, CTO, Saama Technologies, on Free/Open Source Software, Tamil, NLP, Linux Users Groups etc. If you have time to kill for around 2 hours, see it here on “Malai Talks” youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw So happy to revisit my life and share with all. Thanks to Malai for the nice questions and patience on asking.

PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

Weekly Notes 38 – 2024

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

Busy Summer

I missed writing weekly notes for last few months. Just capturing few memorable activities in past few months.

We had a super busy summer in Canada. All the weekends were filled with some event/gathering/viewing places etc. High Park, Harbour Front, Toronto Zoo, Wonderland, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada Exhibition at Toronto, Central Island, few libraries, few book release events, literature meetups are the key places we visited. There were tons of fun events for kids and adults. Mississauga government conducted free play based activities for entire summer. We sent our kids there on all weekdays. It helped a lot to make the kids busy in summer.

Finally, school started for kids last week. Kids are going to new school, this year, as we moved to a new house. Here, schools are allocated based on the living address. We moved to the next street, just some 800m away. Still have to goto another school. Slowly, kids started to go along with the new school.

Tolkappiyam Conference

Tolkappiyam is one of the oldest grammar rule book for Tamil language. it was from several centuries ago. The beauty of the Tamil language is still those old rules are followed mostly. This book is being read, interpreted, understood, explained, practised generations by generations, in all the countries where Tamil people live.

In Canada, we have a conference on Tolkappiyam, next weekend. https://www.tolkappiyam.ca/

I am volunteering on the conference days. Along with Prof. Sathyaraj, presenting a research paper too.

Writing python code for Tolkappiyam grammar rules

Prof. Sathyaraj, Boopalan, kamalakannan, Parameswar, myself and few more people meet every Saturday. We discuss the rules and write them as python code. In a year or so, we hope that we can build a better open source grammar rule engine for tamil in Python.

Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214

Code – https://gitlab.com/boopalan-dev/tamilrulepy

A Tamil professor (Sathyaraj), A math student (Boopalan), An Instrumentation Engineer ( hehe. its me ), A mechanical Engineer(Parameswar) are contributing to Tamil grammar rules in Python is the awesome moments in my life.

After our recent python classes, Tamil professor Sathyaraj writes good code and validates our code quickly.

New website – Kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com

Recently, Tamilnadu government release all the works of former CM Kalaignar Karunanithi, in Public Domain License. It was a long time ask for many readers. Thanks to Tamilnadu government for such great decision. On this year death anniversary, 7 August 2024, we collected few of his books in PDF format and published as a separate website for quick access. Check here https://kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com Completed converting them all to text using automated google OCR ( Thanks to python ).

Sent few books in text format to a publisher for proofreading. Soon, we will get them as print and free ebook in epub, mobi formats too.

Python course completion

We conducted a 2-month online free python course in Tamil. My friend Syed Jafer handled the classes. It was a weekly 3-hour training. Python is a crowd puller. We got some 3500 members in 3 whatsapp groups. 1000+ joined for initial classes. Around 50 people completed the course successfully. Many participants wrote good blogs. We can read all their blogs here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Thanks to Syed for the good classes, Asokan and TalentSprint.com for donating Zoom, and all participants for great enthusiasm. Read my closing notes here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/closing-notes-on-2-months-online-python-course/

Contributions from python class students

Many students started doing good projects. Scrapping, Tamil NLP, and more. We have good project ideas to contribute here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues

Happy to see the students pick some real projects and start contributing to them.

Explore ML – mini crash course

At the Python course, many asked questions on ML. Wanted to give some intro about ML. My friend Dr.Tamilarasan came forward to give some quick intro on ML. It was a 3 day ( 5 hours ) discussion exploring the basics of ML.

Thanks to Dr.Tamilarasan and participants for the nice discussions.

Docker course started

Syed started his next free course. This time the topic is Docker. Get more details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/15/free-online-training-on-docker-in-tamil/

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Chennai

Many FOSS communities jointly celebrate Software Freedom Day in Chennai on Sep 21 2024. If you are in Chennai, buy a ticket here – https://fossunited.org/events/sfd Don’t miss meeting awesome people in Chennai.

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Karaikudi

Kaniyam Foundation team is celebrating software freedom day in Karaikudi. Will share more details soon.

With all friends from free software communities, I always feel like having 100 heads and 200 hands. We all are dreaming same thing at same time and implement all our dreams together. Thanks to all free/open source contributors. You all make the world a better place to live.

Heartcomonos planning meet

HeartComonons is a Non Profit Social organization in my area in Mississauga, Canada. We attend/volunteer for their events as family. Last week, we had a planning meet for next 3 year goals. The brainstorming session was good. Learned many things on how to think as an organization.

Manual Mode in Photography

I was hesitant to learn Linux for many years. Postponed learning Emacs for around 15 years. But, living with Linux for past 20 years and with Emacs for past 3 years. Similarly, I was too lazy to learn Manual Mode in Camera for many years. I just Don’t wanted to miss any good moments, while changing the options in Camera. But, recently, started to play with it. Oh, Man!. It can do magics with the lighting. We can get better outputs, if we can control what goes into the camera with all the manual mode options. I have a huge pile of photos, waiting to upload in Wikimedia commons, so that anyone can use them freely. Keeping this for winter days.

My podcast with MalaiKannan

Recenly, I had a detailed discussion with MalaiKannan, CTO, Saama Technologies, on Free/Open Source Software, Tamil, NLP, Linux Users Groups etc. If you have time to kill for around 2 hours, see it here on “Malai Talks” youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw So happy to revisit my life and share with all. Thanks to Malai for the nice questions and patience on asking.

PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

Closing notes on 2 months online python course

✇Shrini
tshrinivasan

The past 2 months went with weekly 3 python classes in Tamil, from Kaniyam Foundation

We got around 3500 participants in 3 whatsapp groups. Initial days went with some 1000+ students.

As the classes are in Tamil, live streamed, many participants started to learn easily.

We asked to learn, take notes, write blog daily. Many of them started to write. You can see them all here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

I hope minimum 20 students learned python very well.

The project demo days at final weeks proved that within 2 months, anyone can learn python programming and do good projects. All we need is dedicated learning and practicing.

I thank Syed Jafer, who trained us in a easy way. Thanks to all participants for great enthusiasm and hard work on learning.

I got opportunity to handle few classes and few QA sessions. Enjoyed every discussions with the team. Happy to see the progress and read all your blog posts daily. Continue the learning and writing. It is a life long process.

Special Thanks to my ilugc friend Asokan. He is a trainer for 20+ years. He taught python around 2005 in our Chennai Linux Users Group meetings. Happy to learn again from him, on his special training sessions.

On our discussions, he explained how to train python for beginners. Learned on he importance of more good examples, how to explain basics etc.

We all wondered on various methods to solve the fizz buzz problem and the beauty of functional programming.

Thanks for Asokan for mentoring us and TalentSprint.com for providing Zoom for the classes.

The feedback session was interesting. Captured the notes here on the things to improve on the next classes.

Feedback from participants –

  • go little slow
  • more basics and examples
  • first week , explain programming basics for beginners
  • teach flow charting methods for basics.
  • try teaching scratch
  • weekend sessions batch
  • make more conversations by participants
  • make sub groups
  • get cheerleaders within the team to make the classes interactive
  • more promotion needed
  • give better examples
  • more QA sessions are required
  • each one should talk
  • showing face in video can help to get some personal connections.
  • run mini hackathons
  • make more interactions and connections between the participants
  • ask to write blogs daily
  • encourage to give talks in class and other communities

Few more learning’s

  • Don’t create whatsapp group for communications. It has 1024 members limit. Having multiple groups is a headache.
  • Telegram is fine for now. Try to explore mailing list too.
  • Mute the groups, if required, to avoid “hi,hello,good morning” messages.
  • Teach how to join for mailing list like chennaipy, kanchilug and how to ask in forums like https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/
  • Teach how to create a free blog in dev.to or wordpress.com
  • Don’t spend much time on explaining all the things in the language. In 5th or 6th class, they have to write code for a small project. Explain things as solutions for the project ideas or problem statements.
  • Insist on using names when calling people, always. By habit, people will call as sir/madam. avoid that on any technical discussions. We all are equal.
  • Zoom is costly. Even though we invest time on training and money for zoom, only around 50 people will complete the training. Check for other platforms like jitsi or google meet too.

Will try to implement these in our upcoming classes.

If you are interested in teaching any open source technology in tamil, write to us at KaniyamFoundation@gmail.com It can be some 30 min talk or few months trainings.

Thanks for all people who are spreading the knowledge openly. you are the backbone of the life.

Links –

All the training videos are here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQquVptFreE&list=PLiutOxBS1Mizte0ehfMrRKHSIQcCImwHL

Telegram Group – https://t.me/parottasalna

My slides in introduction to python – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/python-tips/python-tips.pdf

350 python tips – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/python-tips/python-tips.pdf

Syed’s website – https://parottasalna.com/

All our blog posts – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz

❌