Balasankar C's personal website. Often talks about technology, literature, freedom and privacy.
Heyo, In production Kubernetes environments, access control becomes critical when multiple services share the same cluster. I recently faced this exact scenario: a GKE cluster hosting multiple services across different namespaces, where a new team needed access to maintain and debug their service-but only their service. The requirement was straightforward yet specific: grant external users the…
Heyo, I have been interested in the concept of Freedom - both in the technical and social ecosystems for almost a decade now. Even though I am not a harcore contributor or anything, I have been involved in it for few years now - as an enthusiast, a contributor, a mentor, and above all an evangelist. Since 2019 is coming to an end, I thought I will note down what all I did last year as a FOSS…
Heyo, Been quite some time since I wrote about anything. This time, it is Debutsav. When it comes to full-fledged FOSS conferences, I usually am an attendee or at most a speaker. I have given some sporadic advices and suggestions to few in the past, but that was it. However, this time I played the role of an organizer. DebUtsav Kochi is the second edition of Debian Utsavam, the celebration of Free…
Heyo, So I attended my first international FOSS conference - FOSSAsia 2018 at Lifelong learning institute, Singapore . I presented a talk titled “Omnibus - Serve your dish on all the tables” ( slides , video ) about the tool Chef Omnibus which I use on a daily basis for my job at GitLab . The conference was a 4-day long one and my main aim was to network with as many people as I can. Well, I…
Heyo, It has been long since I have written somewhere. In the last year I attended some events, like FOSSMeet, DeccanRubyConf, GitLab’s summit and didn’t write anything about it. The truth is, I forgot I used to write about all these and never got the motivation to do that. Anyway, last week, I conducted a workshop on Git basics for the students of CUSAT . My real plan, as always, was to do a bit…
Heyo, So, M.Tech is coming to an end I should probably start searching for a job soon. Still, it seems I will be having a bit of free time from Mid-September. I have got some plans about the areas I should contribute to SMC/Indic Project. As of now, the bucket list is as follows: Properly tag versions of fonts in SMC GitLab repo - I had taken over the package fonts-smc from Vasudev, but haven’t…
Heyo, It is finally the time to wind up the GSoC work on which I have been buried for the past three months. First of all, let me thank Santhosh, Hrishi and Vasudev for their help and support. I seem to have implemented, or at least proved the concepts that I mentioned in my initial proposal . A spell checker that can handle inflections in root word and generate suggestion in the same inflected…
Heyo folks, One of the stuff I love doing is teaching what I know to others. Though it is a Cliché dialogue, I know from experience that when we teach others our knowledge expands. From 10 students, you often get 25 different doubts and minimum 5 of them would be ones you haven’t even thought yourself earlier. In that way, teaching drives a our curiosity to find out more. I was asked to take a…
Heyo folks, Last Saturday, that is 16th July, I attendeda a meeting regarding the upcoming Kerala State IT Policy. It was a stakeholder consultation organized by DAKF, Software Freedom Law Centre and Ernakulam Public Library Infopark branch. The program was presided by Prasanth Sugathan of SFLC (I had met him during Swatanthra, when I helped Praveen in the Privacy track) and was inaugurated by M.…
Heyo, Last two weeks were seeing less coding and more polishing. I was fixing the LibIndic modules to utilize the concept of namespace packages ( PEP 420 ) to obtain the libindic.module structure. In the stemmer module, I introduced the namespace package concept and it worked well. I also made the inflector a part of stemmer itself. Since inflector's functionality was heavily dependent on the…