Friday 9 December 2016

Using Scrapy to crawl websites

A wonderful tool Scrapy came to my notice that can be conveniently used to crawl websites. It has many good features and I tested it successfully on Fedora 25. I am using it currently to do a bit of data mining and data analysis.

Saturday 3 December 2016

Fedora Friends: unique experience in FUDCon Phnom Penh

It was a wonderful experience meeting great folks at Phnom Penh during the FUDCon organised there last month. With some I was already acquainted with from the FUDCon at Pune. With others it was the first meeting. During the event I got to know another wonderful side of Open Source Projects in general and of Fedora in particular and that is the wonderful friendship that develops between collaborators and contributors. Sitting together, encouraging each other, helping to learn and many more things that might seem trivial but have tremendous importance in this selfish world. You won't even know that you are sitting beside and talking to one of the finest engineers of the day. And even if you know very little, there is no inferiority feeling among such wonderful people. It is easy to get haughty and develop ego about the things that we learn and do but not to go that way was one of the biggest things that I took home from Phnom Penh FUDCon.
You should contribute and continue to meet such great folks - I told myself again and again. The talks were great. Rain played spoilsport on the second day, but for me I learnt much and started contributing in areas that I had not touced upon earler. The event ended with the FUDpub and that too was nicely organised with lots of good food, beer and all. There was a sweet telegram group to keep people informed and in touch. And we continued posting in it till we all reached home safely and some continued even after that 😃😃😃😃😃😃