Fireball

This is going to be an interesting weekend. I’ll be leaving for NIT Trichy to attend Pengufest - the foss festival by GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy (Yes, after a long time, Glug-T has chosen to come out public) and Pragyan - NIT Trichy’s annual technical festival.

I’m not planning to participate in any of the competitions, but I’m going there for something more exciting - the Guest Lectures. Me, Shashank and Jyotsna along with a team of 10 organized Guest lectures during Pragyan’07. And it was one of the most memorable experiences that I would cherish forever. I couldn’t blog about Pragyan’07 which I regret(But, I did it for Pragyan’06).

I was there with Pradeep for Pragyan’06 where we saw Ankit Fadia. Pragyan’07 saw some real good speakers - Jimmy Wales, Dilip Chhabria, Sivathanu Pillai, Guruswamy Ravichandran and some Nobel Laureates too!

We slept in the auditorium, I was roaming in my 3/4ths during Rudolf Marcus’s lecture and we were an awesome team. There is so much to recall about Pragyan Guestlectures - I’ll save it for some other post(hopefully). Have a look at the Pragyan’07 pics.

Crowd listening to Jimmy Wales

This time, the pragyangl(as we call it) has done an nice job. First - Noam Chomsky. I was literally jumping when Vijayprakash told me that Noam Chomsky has accepted to talk at Pragyan. If you are near Trichy (or anywhere in Tamilnadu) - don’t miss his lecture. Next, Philip Lebrun - the head of CERN’s LHC. We approached him last year, and he accepted to talk this time.yay!(yes, He is coming down to Trichy). And, Mark Shuttleworth - Ubuntu’s founder and first space tourist is speaking at Pragyan.

More importantly, there is an alumni panel - moderated by Sidin Vadukut. And big list of speakrs - all listed here

Ok, now - Pengufest! GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy started by Vijaykumar was almost dead(to the public) after he left college. After a long time there is something happening public with Glug-T(after Hackercrackdown). It is going to be an install fest - as Taggy says. Besides install fest, there will be some talks as well.

See you at Pragyan’08. (Will I have wifi?)

PS:Hopefully, Glug-T will have a Foss Conference soon(But, please not between September and March. There are too many foss conferences during that time)

You wouldn’t have got any more better Valentine’s day gift. So, it is high time you realize what you should love - your job.

Guys, you’ll rock wherever you go.

Last weekend I attended fossconf.in - my first Floss conference, and it was a good experience. I met tuxmaniac and techno_freak of the #linux-india gang in BCB5 , and a lot more this time - Sup3rkidd0, lawgon, theju, goldgod, karunakar, kushaldas. I waited and ranted, as I couldn’t attend foss.in this time. Later I realized and was happy that I didn’t miss much by not attending foss.in, and was very much waiting for fossconf.

Fossconf wasn’t a conference fulla geek gods with laptops and hacking. But it was a conference for beginner. Though one would get bored seeing “Introduction to PHP/Python/Ruby” kind beginner level talks, there were advanced topics to choose from.

wifi wasn’t there - which was sad, but didn’t matter a lot. Engineering students - mostly from TN(1 from nitt), who came to MIT in their college buses (~80/college). It was a pleasant surprise, when I came to know that all the colleges in Anna University has Foss as an elective! (Will NIT-Trichy have a foss elective soon? )

While the conference was going on, market news kept disturbing me.

Lawgon talked on the Fossconf software itself, which I heard is going to be used in Pycon! His talk wasn’t anything about the code - it was about how the software evolved and how it solved the purpose, just in time. He showed the SVN system, and especially, how to make best use of IRC (#linux-india in particular). For me, IRC has been the best resource in the web, even better than any search engine.

MIT Chennai Campus looked really cozy and small, unlike my college. As you get down from the train in Chrompet railway station - you have the college!

The talks were in the Lecture halls, and in the Hangar(their auditorium+basketball-court+examhall+nothangar) there were Foss projects developed by students as their Final Year project, and the best project also got a prize from Brian Belhendorf(co-founder of Apache). Jaya Engineering College’s participation was really active in most of the places. Also there is a separate OSS conference to be organized by the MIT Computer Science association, named Carte blanche, and NIT Trichy is also going to have an install-fest (pengufest) along with Pragyan‘08.

I talked on OpenID, and my slides are in slideshare.net. I also managed to visit my 2 mama and 1 athai’s house in Chennai, but couldn’t make it to Rajagopal’s house this time.

There are quite lot of people who blog from my college NIT Trichy. Some do it regularly while others like do it very rarely. With famous bloggers like Sidin Vadukut to tech bloggers & current students like Taggy , Hari to people like Sundar who gets his blog article published in Bangalore Mirror, there is a lot of talent which remains hidden. They blog often about NIT Trichy, but hardly being noticed. And NIT Trichy Alumni network isn’t much impressive.

Surendran and Taggy came up with the idea of starting a Blog Planet which could aggregate the posts of all Nit Trichy current students and alumni. With this, they registered the domain www.nittians.com and also put up the blog aggregation. Awesome work guys! This is going to really help NIT Trichy students in the longer run.

And, yours truly is also listed in the planet .

Also, there is a group for NIT Trichy bloggers. If you blog and you are from NIT/REC Trichy, go register in the group put your blog name in the list of blogs and have your blog also listed in the Planet. If you are an alumnus or you own a company who could sponsor to host this domain, Taggy would be really happy!

What am I looking for next? - A nice blog button, that I can put in my blog. And if something really more I need, I would love to see something on the lines of django people - simple-yet-powerful. (RECAL site could have a maps mashup, hmm)

See what taggy has to say about it.
Update: Sidin is being listed in NITtians.com!