Weeks of contribution

This occurred during the months of June,July and August. Sorry for the delayed blog. It was a pile of contribution area introductions, one per week. It was hosted by the Mozilla Tamil Nadu community. The first week was Introduction week in which Mozilla Location Services was explained. It is done in Android with the help of an app called Mozilla Stumbler. It scans for Wi-fi, Satellite signals and mobile signals. Based on these, the location of the mobile is stored. The advantage of this technology is there is no need of internet to determine the location. Achyuth K P, a Mozilla Tamil Nadu member, topped this contribution area. The second week was Localisation week. It was mentored by Khaleel Jageer, a Mozilla Rep. He is one of the core contributors in Tamil. Next one was App development week. It was taken in charge by Vishwaprasath, Firefox Marketplace app reviewer and Mozilla Rep. We had the task of website creation which I have written as a separate blog. Then we had Documentation week by Karthic Keyan. Then there were Add-on development by Naresh, Evangelism by Vigneshwer Dinakaran and some other general stuff. It was full of knowledge and lots of fun. It was the one which gave me a boost to my Open Source contributions.

MozSpace at Madurai

MozSpace is the short form of Mozilla Community Space. It is the place where people from Mozilla community gather to discuss Open Source stuff. There is one such space in Bangalore funded by Mozilla. After my first event at Madurai, Senthil Kumar, Software Engineer in R&D at Qualcomm, offered me a space exclusively for Mozilla. It was previously used by students to learn and teach. It had accommodation facility, 24x7 Wi-Fi facility. It is located at Jeeva Nagar, Madurai. After the first successful Mozilla event at Madurai, we officially declared it as MozSpace Madurai and marked it in Google Maps. It is now used by Open Source Enthusiasts in and around Madurai to learn and teach the web. Currently, people are working there on Open Source projects and localisation contribution has been kick started.

Intro to Localisation in my college

There was a localisation event at Amrita on November 14th. It was a hands-on event conducted by Karthic Keyan (RAL) and Khaleel (Mozilla Rep). There were about 50 people to participate in the event.

 The event started with introduction to FOSS, then Mozilla, its various projects and FSA program. Then there was detailed explanation about localisation, what it is, why should we localise and other stuff like that. Mozilla Pootle localisation was conducted as a hands-on session and the students localised a lot of strings during the event. After the lunch break, there was a meetup where people were encouraged to ask questions. Some videos about Mozilla and maker party were shown. It was a wonderful event and after the event there was swag distribution. We wound up the event at 4.

There was a small event planning after the meetup in which how to conduct an event was explained, why should we conduct event and so on. Looking forward to have more fun and more knowledge.

Plan for track protection campaign

There was new release of Firefox browser on November. The special feature of this browser was termed as Track Protection. It enables the user to avoid being tracked by third party sites. It works in the Private browsing mode as the developers found that people need this feature when they surf the net privately. It is not similar to 'Do Not Track (DNT)' on Chrome. The chrome intimates the sites that you don't want to be tracked but does not prevent that. And it is also no similar to the Tor circuit. The Tor circuit is the process of chaining of proxies whereas this feature will just prevent you from getting tracked. This feature will not be able to hide your data transfers from ISPs or bypass the server restrictions. This feature does this:
1) Will not save browsing history, cookies
2) Will save your downloaded content and bookmarks
3) Blocks the part of the page that will help the trackers

There is gonna be an event in MozSpace Madurai named Track protection campaign. The general idea about browser cookies, privacy, security will be explained in the event. It is scheduled on December 12th. Looking forward to the event date.

Firefox OS developer preview

This developer preview hack was released for Android at hacks.mozilla.org . The download file is just 88.3 MB so feel free to try it. I installed it and tested it on Micromax Yureka plus. The apk is designed in a way to use it as a launcher. The animations were pretty good especially the border swipe animations. The features of opening a browser tab and private browsing in the recent apps menu is quiet useful for net geeks. The native android apps also do run in the platform which is appreciable. I got some issues and bugs too.
1) It doesn't work on my phone. It is Asus Zenfone 5 (Android Lollipop Zen UI)
2) SIM is not recognized
3) Unable to connect to Wi-Fi properly
Here are some suggestions I've got:
1) Will be better if you can reduce the size of the grid
2) More easy swipe notification bar

Intro to FOSS event at Madurai

The first event I conducted after becoming a FSA is Introduction to FOSS and Mozilla at Madurai. It was held at Mozilla Community Space, Madurai. The event started at 10'o clock. Nearly 20 people were there, 16 boys and 4 girls. Half of the population had a knowledge about FSA. I started the event with introduction to free and open source software. I had some reference slides which I used to help people understand better. Then we discussed about some open source projects like linux, android and so on. Then I started talking about Mozilla, its motto and its open source features. It was more of an interactive session and the participants were eager to know more and ask doubts. Then there was explanation about Mozilla products. Then the Firefox Ambassador program was explained in detail, its various levels and other ways to contribute to Mozilla. After these, we have an interactive talk session on net neutrality, open web and site monopoly. After the lunch break, there was a Localization hands-on session by Mohammad Ammar. Ramki, Prasanth, Seshan and Senthil helped me a lot in conducting this event. The event was wound up around 5.30. We have planned to have another event on December 12th.

Planning for my first event

I started to plan for my first event in the month of September. I spoke with club leads, Mozilla Reps and RAL to know about how events are generally conducted, what is the standard procedure and stuffs like that. Vishwa, Khaleel, Karthic and Vignesh helped me throughout the process. The event was planned to be held at Madurai on November 25th. The event is about FOSS and general talks about web and Mozilla. People in and around Madurai were very interested in the event and approached me to help me with the event. We expect 50-100 participants in the event. The FSAs from Madurai got a venue for the event. I created an etherpad, formed a rough agenda and shared it with others. They started refining it and finally we had a perfect plan before us. It took nearly a month for me to do stuffs. I spoke with various people to gather lots and lots of information. We have also planned to have some interactive talks and games to make the participants more interested in the event and passionate about Mozilla. Now I am completely prepared and pumped up for the event. Looking forward to the event date.

Mozilla Task force

There was a call from Mozilla Tamil Nadu community to become a member of task force. I neither was an active contributor nor was an active member. It was just two months after I joined the community. But I applied to join the team. Luckily, I was accepted and I started to get along with the other members of the team. My primary motive was to spread Mozilla contribution to places where people have no exposure to these kind of Open Source related stuffs. I took the initiative of conducting an event at Madurai. The event was about Introduction to various contribution areas. People in the group agreed with my idea and supported me. Vishwaprasath, Khaleel, Karthic and Vigneshwer helped me with forming a perfect agenda and taking steps for the event. I created a pad, put down all my ideas and the other people helped in refining it to a meaningful and useful event. I finalised the event, got a venue and some people from the team volunteered to help me in conducting the event. One of my classmates helped me in all those stuffs. Looking forward to conduct the event.

The Anokha's effect on my college life

Anokha is the annual tech fest held by Amrita university every year. It was held between March 5 and 7th. There was a three day workshop conducted by Mozilla in my college tech fest. As I am pretty much interested in Open Source, I signed up myself for the workshop. The title of the workshop was "Introduction to Firefox OS App Development". During the first two days, they taught us the basics of HTML5, CSS and Javascript. I was pretty much attracted by the way people conducted the workshop. The most awesome thing was Mozilla is not just a browser. They have a lot of other projects and it is one of the most awesome and coolest Open Source organisation I've ever heard about. The community is also pretty cool and are friendly. That was my first intro to Mozilla Firefox. Then a lot of things happened during those two days and I got pretty much into the Mozilla stuff. I signed up for the FSA program and started to know more about Mozilla. That was a turning point in my boring college life.

My first contribution to Mozilla

Hi. My first contribution to Mozilla happened during the Weeks of Contribution. It was a contribution introduction fest held by Mozilla Tamil Nadu community during the months of July and August. I was very much interested and involved in the Weeks of contribution. There were many areas discussed like Firefox OS App development, Add-on development, localisation, Mozilla Developer Network, Mozilla Location Services and so on. There were ppts, video lectures and irc chats to describe the contributions properly and to make the contributors more involved in it. My contribution to Mozilla after I signed up for FSA was to localisation, in short l10n. This l10n is basically conversion of data from one language to other to comfort the user by interacting with him in his native language. I localised a few sentences from English to Tamil. That was my first contribution. Though it was just a small thing, that made me interested in Mozilla. Then I did a lot of stuffs which will the described in the upcoming blogs. I am now an active volunteer and evangelist in Mozilla.

My experience as an FSA

I signed up for the Firefox Student Ambassadors during the month of March. The procedure was really simple and the prerequisites was just to know typing and using the internet. I didn't do much till May. Then I was added to Mozilla Tamil Nadu community. They are a bunch of awesome people, really cool and helpful. I attended my first meet up on June 16 at Madurai. From then, I have been in touch with a lot people and in the recent days. I am very active in contributing to Mozilla. I have worked in Localisation, Mozilla Location Services and testing. It is pretty cool to be a Firefox Student Ambassador. I learned a lot from the community people. I am planning to conduct an event as soon as possible. To be in short, "Mozilla is AWESOME!!!".

Mozilla Meet up

It was my first meet up of Mozilla. It was held at Cafe Coffee Day, Madurai on 16th June, 2015. There were nearly 6 people including me. I, Logaprakash, Mohammad Ammar, Deepak, Kavitha were the attendees and it was organised by Vigneshwer, a Mozilla Rep. We started our discussion with a self introduction. Then there were refreshments for us. Vigneshwer started explaining us about Mozilla, what they do there and how can we contribute to that. The talk was amazing and we were aware of whatever we needed to know to contribute. Then everyone of us started to express our ideas for conducting events, planning meet ups and so on. They were a really cool people and we had a lot of tech talks that day. After the discussion, there was distribution of swags and a good bye note. I enjoyed a lot and learned a lot from them. Hope to meet them soon.

Creating a website

After a long time, I got back into HTML coding and designing a website. It was decided in the Mozilla TN community that the contributors can create a website for their college. Vishwaprasath mentored us throughout the process. The first thing I did was creating a gmail account, Facebook group and a Twitter account. After these tasks were completed, I moved on to creating a github account. Then with the reference of some website design templates taken from various websites, I created a website for my college Mozilla club. The next step was to upload these in github. I used Git Bash, the command line. I created a commit, added all the files and resources and then pushed in into the profile. The website for perfectly working. The next task was to get a domain for myself. I got a domain with .tk extension. It is completely free and easy to register. I redirected the .tk site to the github site so that I needn't do much work. The website is completely ready and I feel good that I learned new stuffs.