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)

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.

…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!

One insignificant day, One insignificant minute, where you and your friends freeze the moment in the different parts of your City. Quite interesting idea. Sagaro a to-be-evangelist never seems to be idle. He was the one who started roof top film festival, and you could see him any unconference in south india(unless svce kicks him)!

If you are in Chennai, and you have a Digicam, just take a photo of whatever is happening around you at 03:11PM on 03-11, or just have a look at the flickr photostream.Mahen, Planemad and a lot from TKF are also getting ready for 0311!

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.