Its a long time I have written something here. Everytime I think of it, I will get involved in something else and forget about it. This time, I can’t resist it.

Our friend, Shyam Karanattu passed away two days before. The saddest part is that it was a suicide. All people who know him are shocked to hear the news and has not yet recovered from it. Shyam was an active free software advocate and activist. Here is what Anivar has to tell about him.

For me, he was more than a friend. He was my senior at THSS Vattamkulam and also at MESCE, though he was in EC branch. He was one of the persons who has influenced me much. Even though I am attracted to FOSS a long time before, it was he who introduced me(and many others) to the FOSS Community and Swathantra Malayalam Computing group. Later, we became colleagues, organized many events at MESCE and participated in many events together. He was the major driving force for the formation of MES-FSUG group and GNULabs at MESCE.

He was so attracted to FOSS and whenever we talked, we end up with something related to it. After his B-Tech also, we kept in touch and the last time I contacted him was during the time of SMC Localization Camp at MESCE. He said he had some family functions and couldn’t attend and will try to be there for the next event. Now he left us without waiting for thee next event.

Here are few snaps of him from my collection.

He has also interviewed RMS during the FSFS.in conference.

Shyam Karanattu Interviewing Richard Stallman for Amrita TV

There are much more to say about him, but….
We all love you Shyam. You shouldn’t have done that, whatever the reason was.

I was excited watching the master blaster scoring the double century and becoming the first person to do so in ODI cricket. I rushed to my system to share my joy with the nettisons. It was then I saw a post by Hiran in facebook saying:

Some one added 225* as sachins score in wikipedia!

I just went through the link, but it was not there. But to my astonishment, found something else interesting.

I wonder if this was right.

So, there is no chance for it to be correct; atleast for team India. I tried to undo that change and came upto this new word: Vandalism.

Lets look what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.

Don’t know whether this is wiki specific meaning; but was a new word to me.

After a few seconds, here comes another change.

Its now Brazil... Do they have a cricket team? I head about them only in football

This was just a beginning. Then came a creative edit by some Indian fan.

A creative edit

Sachin in tri-color. Its nice creative idea, but not suitable for a place like Wikipedia

How did these people play so much ODI's?

Now its 400*

Sachin is now 200, but with an extra star. Its fine, but who the hell is Saeed Tamrel in Pakistan team?

What satisfaction does people get by seeing their name in a popular wiki page for just a few secs or may be minutes? Here is a sample of the revisions happening for the page at that time.

A sample of revisions page

Okay, now it seems fine.

This seems fine

But then came these…

Does any one know a Kumar Vijay in Sri Lankan team?

India is not in the list... May be someone was trying to fix the changes made earlier.

I am also an Indian fan. But this is not a place to show that.

By that, I was tired and left the job of undoing the changes to someone else who will find hapiness in doing so. I might have missed many other similar changes due to my slow connection too(It tooks about more than a minute for me to reload the page). But, my question is why? A non profitable organization helping us to get all the information for free, who should people tamper with it?

The page normally had 3 to 4 edits per day, but at this particular 2 hour duration; from 4PM to 6PM IST, there were more than 300 changes made. Does anyone gets the benefit of these edits? The only thing I knew would have happened was the lose of time of people like me who love Wikipedia. I was eager to check the details of the edits and from where they came, but its exam time and I didn’t perform well in the one that was over today. So, going back to studies…

The page I was mentioning till now was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_One_Day_International_cricket_records If you are eager to know, just go and check out.

This year FOSSMeet at NIT Calicut is scheduled on 5-7 February. For more details on the events, registration and schedules, check the website http://fossmeet.in/

FOSS Hut registrations has already started. Check it here.

Promote it as I did in my site. Promotion banners are available here. Spread it to your friends, colleagues and also through your blog and micro blogs.

Just found out the time line for the next Long Term Support(LTS) version of Ubuntu. Thought it will be worth sharing.

I wasn’t blogging for a long time as I was busy with few works and MESTECH, the annual technical fest at MESCE. Due to the recent situations at college, the event was postponed indefinitely. Let those happenings be another post

Ubuntu 10.04 Timeline

As a part of the annual technical fest of NIT Calicut – Tathva, FSUG Calicut and Geohackers are arranging an open mapping party to map the whole campus of NITC and to be made available in openstreetmap.org.

Check the wiki for more details and try to be there for the party.

We were in search for GPS enabled devices and it helped me to familairize openmoko, the mobile phone with an open source software stack. Thanks to Sreeraj and the Kriyate team for allowing me to hack it. Though the device was an older model(Neo1973), it is really interesting to hack. I’ll be blogging about the hacks I did in the moko soon.