Fireball

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!

If you had seen Anniyan movie, and you have heard the famous “5 per 5 dhadavai 5 paisa thirudina” dialogue, you needn’t much explanation about crowdsourcing.

Freerice is one of the places which aims to give free rice to hungry people by playing a word game. But thats not hidden crowd sourcing! One of the best examples of hidden crowd sourcing is reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a wonderful method to crowd source where both the parties get benefited.

As the site says,

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Such an awesome idea, is being used in this blog for commenting. There are two captcha - words displayed. One for which already the answer is known, and another new one which you will be digitizing for the Internet Archive Books. After reCAPTCHA has shown the new one and gets lot of input, it shows it to another user as a known word.

On similar lines of crowdsourcing, a whacky thought:

The amount of force required for a keystroke is quite negligible. Generally, Buckling-spring type keyboards are used in normal keyboards while laptops have scissor-switch models. Buckling Keyboards are require more effort to press. But, consider a software industry where in there are millions of keystrokes per hour. If this mechanical work were to be converted to high quality energy, you could get extra incentive for your keystroke-labour And yes,It is assumed your company doesn’t use Macbooks.

I removed the eariler sucky theme to a new-bright one I tailored myself. I like this one, a lot. This was partly inspired from Gopal and PStam. As ever, I don’t serve ads. It is a modified version of Almost Spring (though it hardly looks like it). It is available for download here.  I would love to hear your comments !
PS: Note the twitter update just below the blog header

New Years aren’t much special to me, it is just another day with a landmark to say that

• Time isn’t static.
• You are getting old.
• You need to get more responsibility.

Or rather, stop worrying and watch your favourite new releases, call your old buddies and enjoy with your friends!

Happy Rat Year everyone!