Ubuntu Wiki

Vikram Dhillon

About Me

According to my mentor: <av`> your doing everything apart writing good debdiffs and doing packaging stuff

I think that will have to change

I am a teenager and my journey started 2 years now although I got involved into the community in 2009. My first encounter with ubuntu was when I got frustrated with Windows and wanted to look for an alternative. Since then I have recommended Ubuntu to anyone and everyone who came in contact with me. Most of my work is in the field of Computer Vision with UCF : the art of making computer see what we do using mathematics. I am using launchpad to host my code for various project and the bzr integration makes collaboration a breeze.

My Understanding

A lot of people think that Ubuntu is only software and CD's but my thinking is different mostly because I could get in touch with some really amazing people in the community, those who respect each others ideas and this is what make Ubuntu different. Compare this to Microsoft, if I send them a blueprint of my idea, they would most likely not respond to the email and even if by some miracle they do, they would most likely say "Run Along..."

This is one the best feature of Ubuntu, people like me and you can actually play a part in making something bigger than themselves. Also the meetings like Ubuntu Open Week and Developer Week when we have really smart people talking about different concepts of Ubuntu.

People

There are a lot of people who have helped me out in my journey, and I have been perhaps fortunate to get in touch with these great people. Here are some people, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to:

• Andrea Veri: My mentor, and one of the most amazing people I know. He is an awesome teacher and a good friend, but he can be strict sometimes

• Leann Ogaswara: She started me with Ubuntu development, helped me out with triaging some suspend/resume bugs and she has been helpful ever since.

• Phil Bull: An awesome companion, he has been helping me at almost every step of writing documentation, he reviews most of my work and gives me more suggestions on how to improve

• Conner Imes: He started me with writing system documentation, and now thanks to him I am fixing documentation bugs, and also writing my own docs.

• Chris Crisafulli: He is the lead of our LoCo team, and has been helping me at every step in my own project, giving me encouragement and answering any question that I had.

• Michael Hall: Simply the genius around. His questions pushed me to think and write the spec and now I have an intern-ship with Sun basing on that spec template

• Jeremy Pallats: He started me off with editing wiki pages, and writing new ones, since then he's been answering all of my questions no matter how rediculous they were

• Richard Johnson: I am currently working with him on Kubuntu Docs. I am very thankful to him for giving me a chance to write a portion of Kubuntu documentation.

There's isn't much I have said and can say about these people besides two words: Thank You

Contributions

Indirect:

• Mostly advocacy through presentations and such, I have been promoting the use of Ubuntu in the community I live in now and where I used to live in (India).
• So far I have been able to get over 400 installations of Ubuntu done and everyone seems to be happy. I am trying hard with others like me to permanently solve bug #1.
• I am introducing open source alternatives to some of the commercial software like Open Office to my community and that's been pretty useful.

Direct:

Coding

• Created my own project where I have a script that converts DICOM format to .pgm format for training classifiers and other SVM Kernels. I have prepared images for Kernel training that can be downloaded as well (branch)

• Working with OpenCV modifying some makefiles so their integration with OpenMP increases and the training process goes on much faster (branch)

• Working with Harvest UI modifying the opportunities so more can be included and creating a better database to store them so they can be easily queries (branch)

• Writing some test cases for Mago Testing: Chromium-Browser (branch)

• Writing new AppArmour profiles (branch)

• Working on extending Mago for automatic QA Regression Testing and SRU Verification (branch)

• Writing a Launchpad javascript that will sort bugs easily for new comers, and also writing some apps based on launchpad api that help out bug traiges (branch)

• Improving Phil's scripts for IRC queries (branch) so that Ubuntu Documentation team can easily use that tool to know what they need to focus on.

• I am also working on my own project, the proposal can be found here: Proposal. This proposal deals with making new drivers customised for a computer by using linear regression and a dataset of existing drivers also by using meta-data analysis. This is like porting an idea from computer vision to Ubuntu, if and when this idea is complete we won't have any problem with drivers and this would indeed lead more people to switch to Ubuntu.

Documentation

• Writing documentation for Kubuntu (branch)

• Writing upstream documentation for GNOME here

• Working on Firefox documentation here and fixing some bugs in docs. as well

• Documenting GDN v3 for Sun Microsystems, the basic version is available here

• Documenting dtrace, security auditing for FreeBSD, and all systcl instances in the kernel
• For KDE, I am rewriting the documentation for kdepim suite (just got SVN access to KDE)

• Created a Custom Search Engine here and adding refinements to it, so that new users and documentation writers can benefit from it.

• Writing wiki pages mostly that have been tagged needs-expansion, and cleaning other pages

Blueprints and Specs

I am working on implementing a lot of features for Evolution:

• Evolution Plugin Base

• Easy searching through IRC logs

• Viewing the entire discussion thread

• Keep the send email in the same folder as it was send from

• Show threaded messages next to each other in the reading pane

Packaging

You can see my packaging work here

Launchpad

• I have been helping out answering questions (over 1200 karma in answers) and triaging bug,

Translations

• Translating and reviewing Ubuntu translations in Punjabi

Others

• Super-maintainer at Winehq upstream of FFSJ: The Fastest File Splitter and Joiner, Notepad++ and Adobe Air

• I hang out on #ubuntu-doc, #ubuntu-kernel and #ubuntu-bugs helping others get their problems solved.
• Also working with upstream kernel-janitors (just started), kernel docs, and kernel api

Future Plans

My plan in recent future is to learn more Ubuntu so I can make more patches and help others more than what I can now.

• I want to complete my project so hardware based problems would go away.
• Write more documentation for various project (especially Ubuntu) so that they can be useful to other people.
• Write more kernel patches that suite x86 hardware
• And finally the most important others aware of Ubuntu.

Testimonials

• "Vikram pointed me out towards everything he knew about building .deb packages and Ubuntu Kernel Development, and I have to admit that his current knowledge of the subject truly amazes me! His help was at most invaluable to my research and few of my projects. Now, the entire mantra of patch, compile, package, rinse and repeat ... and the whole process of customizing the Kernel in Ubuntu and how it is done is no longer a rocket-science to me. Thank you Vikram for your help!" -- Krzysztof Wilczynski, December, 2009

• "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." -- Aristotle