Happy Birthday dgplug!!

Today, it’s 8th September 2012 and eight years back on 8th September 2004, dgplug(Durgapur Linux User’s Group) was formed with the formation of the dgplug mailing list.

I was first acquainted with this group during a python session taken by Kushal Das. He enlightened us with the various prospects and channelized us on how to contribute, implement and share our knowledge in open source software. Kd da(as we always call kushal) taught me right from the grass root level the very basics of contribution towards open source softwares. dgplug also gave me my favourite mentors kishan and rtnpro who guided me through the various technologies in this field which made me capable to contribute to various open source projects. Though, kishan was always helped me through peaceful ways. But, rtnpro sometimes took the road to violence and gave some nice kicks and punches through IRC. With their help I was able to do my first ever upstream contribution to rtnpro’s project “wordgroupz“.

Moving ahead with my journey with dgplug, I started inspiring out students in my college and shared my knowledge with my fellow mates, juniors and seniors so that the telos of dgplug is achieved and the group becomes larger, stronger and sharper day by day because “Sky is the Limit”.

Since I have joined dgplug, 3 springs have passed and I am a strong believer that being attached to this group will surely help me achieve greater heights in my career. I am really thankful to all who helped me anywhere during this very journey of mine. Lastly, I would love to thank anurag to helped me expressing my feeling towards dgplug through words.

What i’m doing this summer!!

Hi there! It’s been a long time since my last blog post. In the break, I was facing my semester exams, and I felt better stay away from my laptop rather than books. Though other reason of not remaining online was my Nokia C5 mobile got pick-pocketed and I didn’t have any mode to remain online. After the my exam ended, I again bought the same mobile and started on working on transifex. I had already written some code before the exam so that anonymous users can access to the files through web-interface. But, mpessas and rtnpro suggested me to work on allowing anonymous access through the API and write some tests for the same.

So, after the exams this was my first task in hand, I went through the Transifex APIv2 docs and made some changes in the code to get the job done. I also wrote the test with the help of @rtnpro. I was also facing problem with the notification settings bar in the profile settings page. Though the ENABLE_NOTICES settings was set to True. The notification settings bar was not showing up. After the studying the code for the templatetag settings, I found out that the templatetag itself was the cause for the issue. Moving the templatetag inside the content_main block in templates/userena/base_userena.html solved the issue.

In the mean time, I read about the revised version of the Microsoft Translation API. Earlier, the Bing AppID was enough to get the work done. But now, the Bing AppID is deprecated and is no longer supported. To use the Microsoft Translator API, one has to obtain an access token using Client ID and Client Secret obtained after registering an application at Azure DataMarket and use it for the calls to the Microsoft Translator API. The process of obtaining the access token can be seen here . The Microsoft Translator API is well documented and it help me a lot. Currently, I am working on implementing the new Microsoft Translator API in transifex.

I am also currently working on the feature approved by jkal to we allow users to set their username after the first login through the social method in transifex (Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn).

Working up on Dorrie

For some time now, I started working up on Dorrie. Dorrie is a web application which enables users to build a Fedora/Spin.It is a Free Software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 or later and written using Django/Python.

After successfully downloading and deploying Dorrie from GitHub, I found out that it was showing an error “invalid arguments to setopt” in the /basic/ page. So after googling for few minutes I came to know the error was arising because setopt was receving uni-code as the argument in place of string So, after the modification of the code, I sent the patch upstream. Later, Shrink, rtnpro and I were discussing on Dorrie so rtnpro came up with the idea of making the code modular and dividing the codes in files based on type of settings. He also told of introducing django-addons into Dorrie as it adding a true plug-n-play functionality to our own Django applications and he assigned me the job. Since, it had been quite sometime I had worked on Git, I had forgotten some of the commands so I had to google the commands again and write out the patch. I sent out the patch upstream the following day. Here is my Dorrie clone on GitHub.