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.

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

Its now more than 2 months, that we(me and my colleagues aka Flipperz) attended the class. More precisely, we last attended regular classes on 14th of August. On 15th evening, we left for our 5 day tour and when we were back, it was time for study leave. Theory exams were like a marathon, which took more than a month to finish, even though there were 6 subjects. After that came the DSA Lab practicals. Mine was over on 14th this month, but exams continues till 21st as we have two batches in CSE. So, as a result, almost 2 and a half months without classes, which is one of the largest gap, in my entire school/college days. Still, one more practical is left and there are chances for it to be being scheduled by the end of this month. So, the gap will increase again.

When there are regular classes, we all will be looking for ways to get a leave. Now, as far as I know, all are hoping for the classes to start soon; not because of the thrive to study, but it feels being irritated staying home, without the company of friends and the jokes and other stuffs that happens daily @ college. For me, I spent most of the time at Fastech Systems, doing this and that, playing network games, browsing net and so on.

What made me think about writing this post is the upcoming 5th semester, which we call by the pen name “S5″. Its just two months remaining to complete the portions and it makes me feel very HAPPY to think that 2 subjects have NOT yet started and there are more than 3 modules left in the rest. In this short time, we must attend two internals too…

Oh God, please have mercy on us. Please don’t make the teachers think of taking extra classes

Its a question, lot of my friends asked. I explained them that the name was a typo error(or spelling mistake or what you may call it). Many are not happy with the explanation and hence I thought of making it a blog post. You might feel it autobiographical. It covers major things that happened from my high school till now.

All my web hosting and designing stuffs started when I was in 9th standard at THSS Vattamkulam. We there had a subject based on Computers in 8th, 9th as well as 10th. It was a subject special for THSS. So, we didn’t have any prescribed text books. The IT club decided to make a organized digital copy of all the content and make it available for all. It was Hari sir who led the team and me and Krishnaraj were assigned the work of collecting the stuff for 8th. Unfortunately, not much among the groups took it seriously and the project was abandoned. We had some content, roughly about 10 pages. So, we decided to put it up somewhere. We went out in search of free hosting and came across few ones with ads. We decided to put it under our class name and thus, we became the first internet club from our school. That was the Comrades group. The website later become entirely focused on the class and the activities within. It was Krishnaraj, who worked more than me as he had a computer that time.

Inspired on seeing our work viewed by lot of people, I started a site for my on, which was of the form of a portal that time with just raw HTML. I still remember the account and it was on f2g.net. Then came the problem with name. I needed some name which sounds interesting and has a meaning. So, I started checking out the Webster’s dictionary page by page. The book was so big and looking word by word was really horrible. After a few days, I came across a word with the meaning “small storm”. Thus, bizzard.f2g.net came to exist. For long time, I believed that the word was “Bizzard” itself. Time to time I shifted the hosting and ended up with profusehost. Profusehost was really great, having C-Panel and 2GB space, still having ads, but with the freedom to place it according to the site theme. It was from there, I came in touch with Coppermine and WordPress. All these happened during 2003-05 period. During the last of 2005, I came across an ad of .info domains @ just RS 100 from an IT magazine. I checked for Bizzard and it was there. Thus, came Bizzard.info, which was parked to my Profusehost account. During those days, I was depending the school library for the HTML books and the lab for the internet and computer facilities. Whenever the classes were left early, I ran to to the Internet cafes at Edapal for updating the site. The site had nothing serious, just some photos, so and so, but I was really crazy with it.

After my 10th, during the vacation, on 5th May 2005, I became a proud owner of a P4 2.4GHz system with *0GB HDD and 256MB RAM, which I continue to use now too.

I don’t exactly remember, who pointed me the spelling suggestions that showed up, when googling for Bizzard. It usually comes when such a word is not in the dictionary. I rechecked the Websters and I had to accept the fact that the name Bizzard was a spelling mistake from my part. The real word was “Blizzard”. I missed out a “l”. But it was too late to correct as it gained popularity among my friends. No domains with the name “Blizzard” was available and that made me somewhat happy. I decided to continue with the name and so, its still Bizzard.

At profusehost, I moved to post for host without any ads. Had to make 30 posts a month in the profuse community forum(later reduced to 15). The forum will be almost dead for the first three weeks a month and the fourth week, it will be crowded with posts. The situation still continues. Along with Bizzard.info, I maintained the Comrades site and a personal site for myself; tvmanukrishnan.co.cc.

I completed my +2 from THSS itself, joined MESCE for B-Tech and by the time, I changed completely to GNU/Linux and became interested in free software, studied CSS, PHP, MySQL, worked a lot with blogs, galleries, CMS, etc their theming and plugins and started making websites as a freelancer.

As my work increased, two months before, I handed over the control of Bizzard.info to my friend Jom, who seemed to have interest with it and had his own ideas. But, two times, he failed to complete the post quota at Profuse community and the site got suspended. So, I reacquired the domain and now using it as my personal site. I started loving to be called bizzard in the E-World.

I now work with Cool-Works Web & FOSS Solutions, founded by me and my cousin Prakash, with the support of my friends, especially Krishnaraj, who was with me from 8th and still in same college, same class, same bench I now deals with Web Designing, Consultation, Design, SEO and other web related stuffs.

Hope its all clear. Its now more than 5 years in am onto this field. I am always happy to share my knowledge and experience with those who are interested. You can also contact me for any consultation during my free time and its always free of cost You can call me, mail me or come to chat with me. Please don’t give me miss calls. I am tired of having many.

Today, almost all in my class(May be all @ college) came to college thinking of strike. But surprisingly, nothing was there in front of the college gate(For all strikes, we usually see a lot of students gathered there blocking the way to college). So, everyone went to classes sadly…

There were rumors that the class will be suspended by noon. After the 2nd period, few seniors came with the notice and all was happy. I have nothing to do at home, so, I stayed at college and with the permission of HOD, continued with the Debian installation in the Internet and Multimedia lab of CSE department. Though Mahesh was present, he was busy with some other works. My classmate Mansoor KPA also helped me in the installations. By 4.30PM, we installed 15 systems with Debian and the one alloted for GNULab with gNewSense.