SeasonOfKde_FirstLook

My first Technical Blog. Am I officially a Geek now?
This also happens to be the first post in this blog. So, for people who are reading me the first time, DO NOT sleep while reading me. Endure and be good. I like the basic idea of Communications and Networks and most of my technical work is related to these fields. I am not so much of a coder. Currently, a rookie, yet i attempted Google Summer Of Code this year for an organization called Freifunk . It matched my interests and I was attempting to develop a project of theirs called Freimap. I hope to work with Freifunk in the future.

Season Of KDE – the HOW
It was 25th May. Google Summer Of Code results were out and I wasn’t selected in Freifunk because Freimap was not on their priority then. KDE has created a great impact in DA-IICT because of a poignant man called Nikhil Marathe( Happy? 😛 ). Again, credit goes to him for getting me into SoK. That night, even amongst celebrations of 8 people getting selected into GSOC from DA-IICT, he tipped me to Lydia’s Blog The next morning I applied and told( the very friendly and fabulous) Lydia about my idea. She told me the further procedures. Subsequently I proposed my ideas on kde-devel and somehow everybody loved it and we were discussing how I planned to do it. I said I was new to KDE and did not know much. Again enter Nikhil and he suggested people would be more interested in having such a service module in telepathy. So here I land on #kde-telepathy and find fantastic people. Thank You George Goldberg(grundleborg)for making life hell for the next 2 months for George Kiagiadakis(Gkiagia). The latter is a wonderfully tolerant and patient man who helps me a lot! Happy to have him mentoring me.

An Idea
I had this idea of developing an application/device which will be able to map the location of all ‘online’ people in a particular place, say a campus. So, the moment you switch-on-the-device/ open-the-application, a map of your local area / network pops up and you will be able to see people nearby. Then, just click and start a chat OR click and call! It was basically to emulate The Marauder’s Map from J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I hope to work on that idea soon. It has a lot of potential and more importantly, I will learn a lot. I plan to use ideas of JMDNS and reverse DNS queries. More about it in a future blog (Apple Inc, this idea is my copyright! Dare you use it without telling me!)

Telepathy – And How I contribute
Telepathy is a Real Time Communication framework for people who want to write applications for real time collaborations and communications like IM. Wonderful concept of diffusing the differences of IM protocols ( like XMPP/jabber , IRC, YMSG etc). There are applications like Empathy that use Telepathy. So I am to build a mapped interactive UI for Telepathy. Basically, a contact list which is a map kind of thing that will have red and blue (you may change the colour if you want, I’ll add that feature) bubbles at the geo-locations of your contacts. So, for instance if I am on your contact list, YOu will be able to see a Red bubble on the map indicating my location. The bubble shall also show my status and other general information of your contact. The plan is to get as user friendly as we can get. You click on the bubbles and begin chatting! 😀 Lets see how much I am able to add to it. Of course, working on it even after SoK is imperative.

A sneak-peak

Can you see Me and George? You will be able to zoom and rotate the globe!

The Next Steps
Currently, I am working on , building an Application that will read two contacts and their information and use my marble map to embed these contact informations. I had been designing the application this week. I am positive of getting to somewhere the coming week. The road goes all Up-hill now! Well, goodLuck me! Hope I can dazzle! you all! 😛

Yours Mappingly,
Dunce

(ps: All those who are still awake, there is more such boring stuff at My Other Blog ;-P)