dhillonv10

Revision 19 as of 2009-12-16 20:05:10

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Vikram Dhillon

Launchpad ID:

https://launchpad.net/~dhillon-v10

GPG Key

1C700064

My project

https://launchpad.net/imaging

IRC:

dhillon-v10 irc.freenode.net

Email:

dhillonv10 at spamfree gmail dot com

Team Memberships

Launchpad-dev | Ubuntu Doc Contributor | Ubuntu Florida LoCo | |Ubuntu Kernel Team | Ubuntu Testing | Ubuntu Bug Squad | GNOME Doc Contributor | Ubuntu Drupal

About Me

I am a teenager and I have been using Ubuntu for over 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 recommend Ubuntu to all the people I come in contact with and I am happy with what I found. 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 just learned about hosting code on Launchpad and I have to say this is amazing. I am using launchpad to host my code because of its amazing integration with bzr.

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.

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:

  • I have been helping out answering questions (over 8900 karma in answers) , triaging bugs, writing blueprints and specs for Ubuntu Drupal, Evolution mail and my own project Smile :)

  • 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.
  • Working with OpenCV modifying some makefiles so their integration with OpenMP increases and the training process goes on much faster.
  • Writing wiki pages mostly that have been tagged needs-expansion, and cleaning other pages
  • 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
  • Writing a Launchpad javascript that will sort bugs easily for new comers, they will just have to install it (branch)

  • Also working with upstream kernel-janitors (just started).
  • Writing documentation for Kubuntu (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.

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

  • 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.

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

  • I hang out on #ubuntu-doc, #ubuntu and #ubuntu-bugs #ubuntu-kernel helping others get their problems solved.

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.
  • Writemore guides for Ubuntu-docs 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.


  • "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


Thanks,

Vikram