Vikram Dhillon

About Me

I am a teenager and my journey started 2 years ago, 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 and OpenCV: the art of making computer see what we do using mathematics. I am now more familiar with Ubuntu packaging policies, after messing up so much, I have pretty much memorized all different types of error messages you can get while packaging. Compared to when I started off, my skills have definitely improved a lot. I wish to have Edubuntu upload rights so that I can upload patches and bug fixes and new as quickly as I can (after a sanity-check of course) and help Edubuntu rise again

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..."

One of the most amazing features of Ubuntu is the vibrant community. This enables people like you and me to play a part in making something bigger than themselves. Events like Ubuntu Open Week and Developer Week also introduce the latest and coolest features in 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 he's like a big brother to me. He is an awesome teacher, 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

• Connor 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: Another awesome companion, always helpful whenever I need him. 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.

Hats off to you guys. 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)

• 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.

• Making a comment-based documentation tracking system, one that would help documentation writers easily get reviews on the pages that people use and also on the quality of those pages. This would be helpful to all the major Unix/Linux distros

• Working on UDD (Ultimate Deiban Database) in Alioth and also with Debian Quality Assurance here

• 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)

• Fixing a lot of documentation related bugs

• Writing upstream documentation for GNOME here, basically scripts and templates for Mallard porting

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

• Documenting dtrace, sound basesystem, security auditing and and all systcl instances in the kernel for FreeBSD
• For KDE, I am rewriting the documentation for kdepim suite, traiging bugs documentation and website bugs. Also starting to contribute to the Release team

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

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

Packaging

You can see my packaging work here

Launchpad

• I have been helping out answering questions (over 1200 karma in answers). I try my best to focus on the unanswered questions.
• Triaging bugs mostly related to documentation, U/K/Ed ubuntu Websites, X-swat with 945GM chipset, and linux-kernel
• Coding new features for Soyuz

• The bugs I have worked on can be found here

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.
• Submitting patches to upstream kernel-janitors, and the mainstream kernel hackers (mostly performance optimizations).
• Android Code Reviewer for bionic section

• OpenSolaris Developer/Documentation writer

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

This is where you can say what you think about me and my work in Ubuntu:

• "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

• MTecknology: I met Vikram back when he was still learning the ropes. His progress all around has constantly amazed me. There's no way you can halfway know anything and get to the point he's at. Truly impressive work with a great attitude to match. He's an ideal picture of the Ubuntu community.

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• "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

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