Fireball

…photography Collective!

Frankly, I didn’t spend much time in any other collective. Jace,Balaji, Vinayakdas, Arul, teKnofreaK and lunatech were there. It was one of the groups that I was looking forward to meet after BCB4(mahen,lavanya,mdemon were missing).

The first day, Vinayakdas(the-one-who-found-his-wife-at-bcb4) answered a lot of questions, and showed us  some examples of Multiple exposure option, where in up to three exposures can be combined into a single image. This feature was quite impressive, it could pick out which regions needed more exposure and which needn’t. Got to know about BSOAP, and BWS from them. Later that evening, it was Amit’s talk.

While browsing, I came across Nikon D40’s ad. Quite impressive. Forget the ad, the page has almost everything that a person wanting to buy DSLR needs to know – in simple words.

The second day, Arul organized a photo-review session, where in people could show their photos and everyone could comment/review it.  Akshath’s showed his photostream, and explained a few tricks that he employed.The strobist set in his photostream is worth noting. One of them, which he explained – a 2 minute exposure photo, while he ran around firing flashes in around 3-4 directions. *awesome*. And, flickr is getting really addictive.

Around evening when the discussions for BCB6 was going hot, Hobbes`,tuxplorer,teKnofreaK and tuxmaniac  and myself got together and discussed about random topics around #linux-india. It was surprising to note that Hobbes` has  been living in PST since the past 8 years, in India.

What I could note from BCB6 was that, there were a lot of people coming, but there weren’t much talks. Collective format worked out really well, and the Dari’s – super! What I would like to see at BCB6 is  good discussion, and of course the photo collective.

PS: Btw,I came across chittr, an Indian Twitter. Man, Web 2.0 is so commonplace!

This one was a long time pending post, but reading the blogs of few other lazy people encouraged me to continue to write,after three weeks. After the Internal Hackday, Yahoo! hosted the first Open Hackday in India. The idea was awesome. Around 100 geeks gathered at Taj Residency, MG Road just near Yahoo!’s MG road Office, on 12 , and there were a few who were jealous!

I got the chance to be a part of the organizing team, thanks to shivku. David Filo,Bradley Horowitz and Chris Heilmann were some of the invitees from Yahoo! US and UK. There were talks by Chris,Bradley, Shivku and Raghu Ramakrishnan.

Anil Patel, spearheaded the whole event. I got to meet Pradeep Gowda and Swaroop CH, whose blogs I have been following for quite a long time. Most of the hacks were mashups or some smart mixup, I really wanted to see something like this. Most of the hacks were impressive, my personal favourites were Vizualizr, and Maps doodle. Started at 2:30PM on friday, ended at 2:30PM saturday, and the demoes were at around 6PM, perfectly planned. After demoes-prizes-vote-of-thanks, we had a band Thermal and a Quarter. Joe and others started dancing! I managed to take a couple of photos from Vishal’s camera. Mine sucked.

One of the things that came to my notice after Hackday was the resources available in YDN (aka) Yahoo! Developer Network. YDN is *the* destination if you want to learn Frontend Development.

YUI theater is simply awesome. Lectures by Crockford, Joe Hewitt and others in YUI are really worth spending time. I had an impression that Javascript is a language that doesn’t require importance enough to learn, which was easily proved wrong by Crockford. Crockford isn’t biased, he points out the disadvantages of the ECMA standards, as well as the good parts of Javascript. While debugging javascript was irritating with alert boxes, Joe Hewitt’s Firebug is a saviour. I am using Firebug heavily these days. Have a look at those videos, when you are free.

And, Yahoo! Maps India has got driving directions now.

PS:This is how you write a post totally away from the topic.

Let the photos do the talking, this time(yes, no mokka blog-post)

Read the post by 100rabh, nice summary.

This time it is D-Camp. Its all about Interaction Design, User Experience and Design Innovation as its website says. Got the info from Sridhar, it is taking place in our office itself on the day after Ganesh Chaturthi.(Sep 16th)

There are only managers and CEO’s around in the participants list I’m expecting to learn something more from this camp.

Waiting to meet all the Barcamp guys again (Jace,Mahen,Sagaro,Dhempe,Sid,Srikant)

PS: Every time I attend an unconference, i get recharged. I need a life time recharge coupon.

Another weekend, another event!

But BRTFF is not just another event. It is something special. Back in college, I always wanted to attend a Film Festival like this one. When dhempe told me that the registrations are open, I was the one of the first to register

Brtff is an ideal platform to meet budding film-makers. The aura of unconference adds a touch of feel-home sense for BRTFF.

As of now, I dont have much to say about BRTFF. Waiting to learn something new this weekend

PS: Check alagu.net