Birding expedition to Carmbolim Lake

FOSS.IN/2009…..Catching up the action!



I finally sat to write the long due blog post of my experience at FOSS.IN/2009, which by all means, as Atul said and seconded by everybody present for it, was the best FOSS.IN ever. It was beyond every limit trying to reach the farthest extent possible.

“Everything is delayed, something is not working or partially working! So it definitely has to be the time for FOSS.IN” Atul opened up the silence as he took the stage to give the introductory talk where he explained what everyone wanted to know, including the official smoking area. It’s a treat to watch Atul speak and he wins it every-time. The inaugral function was an informal one with people from different parts of India and world were chosen to light the lamp which marked the beginning of yet another version of historic event called FOSS.IN!

Apparently, the event ran through thin sponsorships this year but nothing could stop the enthusiasm and spirit of open source community from making this event a remarkable one. Nokia, Yahoo and Thoughtworks were the official sponsors for this event. Nokia stall was grabbing attention since they were displaying their latest sensation Nokia N900, a maemo based smartphone and hackers from all around the world were exploring it’s potentials. Mrinal Kalakrishnan integrated it to control his ROS while there was this remote controlled toy car which was controlled by N900. Yahoo announced a FOSS quiz everyday consisting of five questions and a winner would get an iPod each day. I made it to 2^nd day winners but luck ditched me at the lucky draw and I had to be happy with a Y! Kit which contained a t-shirt, a stressball, a pen and a keychain.

Talks

FOSS.IN is not about the talks, it’s about getting things done! Indeed it was about getting things done and there were few talks, most of them focusing on low level technologies. The real action was going on upstairs at the hackcenters but I chose to remain away being skeptical about my programming abilities. I am a C programmer(skills of which still needs to be polished) as of now and know some Java stuff that’s it. Moreover, I thought I would not know anything about open source programming but for which I cursed myself later since there were people who were contributing in any way they could to the projects. After attending KDE Project of the Day, my all worries about contributing to open source vanished. Especially after watching live bug fixing and one of which was dont by a guy who did not have any knowledge about Qt but managed to resolve a usability bug reported.

Though talks were less, they were awesome. The Cloud Computing talk by Janakiram MSV, What’s your Status.Net? By Jon Phillips, Next Generation Addons by Anant Narayanan, Maemo as developing environment by Amit Sethi etc were the peak of the event. The whole line up of talks and the slides can be found schedule’s page here.

I had my share of talks for this year, next year it will be just workouts!

Project of the Day

I attended one Project day on day 3 which was KDE. One of the most unforgettable time of my life was here at KDE POTD. Pradeepto and his team who represented the KDE community were just awesome. The most striking thing was Pradeepto’s humble nature which makes him the true ambassador for KDE community which today thrives on same principles. KDE contributors introduced us to how/why they got into KDE, how easy it is to fix a bug in KDE, and designing a small plasma applets.

Keynotes

If there is a word to describe things beyond awesomeness, please let me know so that I can use it to describe these 5 keynote speeches which ended each day at FOSS.IN.

Dimitris was the first keynote speaker who spoke on “Building Disruptive Open Source Project” wherein he talked about the approach we need to adopt in building a successful open source project. On the similar lines, Phillip Tellis delivered a keynote speech “Shut Up and Hack” on Day 4 highlighting it’s more important to hack than rather talk about it. He did some live hacks such as making a webpage draggable using Javascripts. It was a privilege to watch ace hacker Harald Welte speaking about why it is important to open up the communication protocols such as GSM, RFID and DECT. He pointed out various flaws in functioning of these protocols such as lack of mutual authentication in GSM. One thing he revealed about himself was that he never studied computer science at school. He learnt it by reading source code and that too he started it at the age of 11..Jiyo Harald Jiyo! Project Blinkenlights was yet another mesmerizing keynote by Millosch Meriac which showed the extent to which open source has influenced the world.

Out of all the five keynotes, my pick was Mrinal’s ROS (Robot Operating System/Robot Open Source) which left everybody stunned in the audi. He showed clips of the humanoid robo completely working on open sourced code doing crazy stuff.

People

The strength of FOSS.IN is it’s people! People who organize it, people who volunteer for it and people who make it the most happening event for everybody else present over there. I knew some of the team FOSS.IN members Kishore Bhargava, Tarique Sani, Kalyan Varma, Gaurav Vaz, Hari etc through twitter but meeting them in person was altogether a different experience. I knew Tarique since I had seen his odonate photographs in the odonata ebook by IISc and who in the wildlife photography arena doesnt know Kalyan Varma. Meeting Kalyan was the yet another unforgettable moment of my life and his down to earth nature was very impressive.

Other than team FOSS.IN members, I met Ashwin Baindur, a proud non techie and non geeky personality from Pune who was here to attend FOSS.IN. He is a professor in Army College and also an avid naturalist. (his latest tweet reads that he is learning Python and has written hello world program).

He was one of the most enthusiastic person roaming around sharing and learning with others. Meeting people like Swapneel Patnekar, Ajay Kumar (the SAHANA guy) was a good experience and I got lot of pointers from these people.

Fun

There was unlimited Code, Coffee and Wifi all around and these are enough reasons for geeks to get going. Food was way too awesome and tasty. I was greedily grabbing goodies from everywhere which summed up to 5 t-shirts, 1 KDE Hoodie, offcourse the FOSS.IN delegate Kit and loads of stickers and a nice sling bag from Thoughtworks with a geeky one liner “Geeks shall inherit the earth and we are OK with it”.

On day 4, we had local band Blues Before Sunrise playing a gig for us which was indeed a very good gig. The F in FOSS.IN does stands for FUN…and it’s beyond limits!

Day 5

This surely needs a separate mention. The events which happened these days are majorly responsible for making FOSS.IN/2009 the best and memorable FOSS.IN ever held. I had my return journey scheduled at 5:30 from Majestic which meant I had to leave the venue after lunch, collect my luggage from Dhempe’s house and run to Majestic from HSR layout. The previous night, Gaurav had told me that Raghu Dixit would be playing at FOSS.IN! I cursed myself heavily for booking the ticket on day 5 inspite of faintly knowing the open secret that Raghu was about to play a gig for FOSS.IN delegates. This was a rare chance to catch Raghu Dixit’s voice live and I wasnt sure I would be able to do so in near future in Goa. I did not wanted to go to Goa with a sad face cursing myself about missing the most awesome part of the event. In spur of moment, I decided to stay back and started googling about ways to get back to Goa post the gig was over. Luckily, Paulo had a volvo leaving for Goa at 10 pm. Dhaval, my Goa LUG mate helped me to book tickets online and now I could rest in peace. Sorry KSRTC if you waited for me since I did not cancel my ticket. I know you wont let that seat be vacant anyways because you stuff people on the way.

After Mrinal Kalakrishnan’s stunning keynote, there was Atul giving the closing speech for FOSS.IN where he summed up everything that went to make this event the most happening one. He announced that it will be his last FOSS.IN as a team coordinator since he had to give time for his priorities which he has been skipping all these years. He gulped his emotions while saying this and so does everyone else in the audi. Atul Chitnis, the name was synonymous with FOSS.IN and people surely missed their heartbeats when they heard Atul would be no more heading the FOSS.IN team henceforth. He announced that he would be putting up a system which will extend FOSS.IN beyond what it is now.

And than there was SUPERFUN….Raghu Dixit playing live for FOSS.IN delegates and he was beyond compare one of the most soulful voice India has ever produced. He started with hindi numbers like Hey Bhagwan, Khidki, Mysore Se Ayi, Ambar and slowly turned all the audi into Kannadigs with his rocking kannada numbers. I usually dont dance, but I had to do it this time! Raghu brought the curtains down for FOSS.IN! Sadly I could not attend the last number he played since I left by than to catch my bus but there was no much regret about it.

After being rejected by three arrogant rick fellows to drop me to race course road, the third rick guy finally dropped me to the correct place to catch my bus back to Goa. I was on my return journey to Goa with loads of enthusiasm, spirit and thoughts, ideas (and off course Goodies) from FOSS.IN/2009!

What an experience it was…..everything beyond compare! Was it a dream I was watching for 5 days in a row??

FOSS.IN/2009–Prologue

I had planned a daily post on all five days of my ramblings at FOSS.IN/2009 but that would have been nothing more than an activity log. This was an experience more than anything else and logging it in five different posts would have the crappiest thing I could have done. So I got various requests, doubts, questions etc to respond about it. I have planned a three post series; a prologue, the real action and the epilogue. Mind you these might be the long posts (and far long in the era of 140 characters) but it’s worth it. The more I write about FOSS.IN, the more I have to write. It cant be summed up so easily but this is my sincere attempt. I may fail giving you exactly the same experience as I had for five days, but I cant help it. You have be to actually physically present to get the vibes! So here is the prologue.

PROLOGUE

I don’t remember now how I had hit this event on the net called FOSS.IN. Maybe I guess when I started following Atul Chitnis on twitter or I guess I knew about it even before that but I got serious with it after knowing Atul through Twitter. The turning point of it was the youtube video of the lecture he delivered at Google-Bangalore on the inauguration of GTUG. Since I was an unlimited user, spending my bandwidth for a one n half hour video is not a big deal, and I had done it quite often. This video was the reason for the madness that followed after, and moreover the man Atul himself. He was mesmerising with his speech, telling about very own Indian open source contributors and how they have influenced the projects that they have been working on. Much of it was a result of FOSS.IN since its inception. It changed my whole perspective towards Linux and Open Source and Atul cleared some of the doubts I had about Open Source very well. From a general user, I wanted to be a potential contributor. I got hooked up to foss.in website and started googling for more info about it. The more i dug dip, the more I sank in it. This was it and I registered as a delegate for FOSS.IN/2009
The decision was taken in dilemma “to go or not to go” since i was a complete noob in FOSS contribution. But so does everybody was once in their life and I gave it a shot. Arranged logistics myself which was another experience altogether. Finding reservation, booking tickets, accommodation n what not, but everything got executed (almost) smoothly.
I had no relatives or even friends in Bangalore but some acquaintances here n there. Madhura helped me out with some tips here n there and then there was Hrish who had come down to Goa after winning a Kingfisher contest to IFFI. I met him and he solved my most worried problem of accommodation. His apartment was quite close to NIMHANS so I happily accepted the request. Untill then, I knew these people only through internet.
So finally I was in Bangalore on 30th Nov to attend India’s biggest open source conference which is ranked as one of the five important FOSS conference all over the world which they called “FOSS.IN/2009”

To be continued……

At banagalore for FOSS.IN/2009

a short post from bangalore! yes I am in bangalore attending FOSS.IN/2009..to know more n live updates about the event..please follow my twitter timeline!

Computing is Personal…and portable again!

The wait is over finally! I got myself a HP Pavillion dv4 1502TU notebook. Looks elegant and has sexy finish….the feel is just too awesome. Detailed review will be posted soon as I guess there is no review available on net on this perticular model.

Day One at IFFI

Finding time today was not much difficult since the practicals were cancelled and there was no computer science lecture, and moreover physics n maths were in post lunch session. So I headed straight to Panjim instead of Margao to mark my attendance for the first day of IFFI 2009. Again for this year there were long queues for getting tickets. (Bad impression No. 1). Pretty skeptical about getting tickets because people standing before me had a list of 6 films but managed to get tickets only for one out of that list. I had slight hopes because I was going for Indian Panorama section. And luckily I got it!
These were two films, one non feature film .In For Motion and another one, feature film made in Goa which made it ti IP section “Palatadcho Manis”. I usually avoid going for Indian films because they can be seen anyways on TV but this time I was curious about Palatadcho Manis since it won an award at Torronto Film Festival.
Bad Impression No.2!
I got the ticket for “.IN For Motion” and “palatadcho manis” which were to be screened back to back in one screen. The timing printed on the ticket was 12:00 and the timing on the screening schedule also said the same thing. But they mentioned on the screening schedule that there would be an inaugural function of Indian Panorama section at 11:00, so nothing to do I thought of attending that. When I entered the theater, the movie “.IN For Motion” had already started. It got over at 12:00 and at the same time many people entered in to attend its screening.
Movie Reviews
1) .IN For Motion
.IN is a domain extension for India and this film is about India’s recent growth trends in India after economic liberalization with main focus to Indian IT Industry. It was a non feature documentary film. I liked the form in which this film was presented, a form of a collage of snippets of current India which have no interconnection but are bound together by the Indian factor itself. Much of the film talks about the IT wave hitting India, the efforts that went in building Indian Computer at Indian Statistical Institute which was later stopped by a review committee. The film travels from Banglore to Arunachal Pradesh to Pune to Gurgaon to Cyberabad (heard it for the first time, is it another name given to Hyderabad?). The film left many impressions as well as few unanswered questions in your mind about the future effects of the way India industry is growing in current scenario.
The film has brilliant cinematography and flawless editing. No wonder it took three years to shoot the film and 9 months for editing.
My Rating :- 3/5
2) “Palatadcho Manis” (The Man Beyond The Bridge)
A story about a forest guard Vinayak who starts liking a mad woman whom he finds outside his residential quarters and lets her inside his life. At the same time he has tough time preventing the villagers from intruding the forest for cutting trees for firewood. He is outcasted by the villagers because he lives with that mad woman who soon is going to be the mother of his baby. Villagers are outraged against him since he every now and then catches them while cutting the trees. His affair with the mad woman gives them opportunity to plough against him and smash his house. frustrated with this torture, he shatters the bridge enroute to his house and lives abandoned life far away from the awe of villagers.
Chittaranjan Giri and Veena Jamakar have done a brilliant performance, especially Veena with hardly any dialogues and the play of her facial expression leaves you awestruck. A complete movie with no minute voids here and there. Also the movie is very well textured and it is strongly reflected through the art direction. A must watch film!
My Ratings:-3.5/5
3) The Prize
This was a competition section entry from Peru. It’s about a countryside teacher who has a daughter who lives with him and a son who lives at her aunt’s place in other town. And there are other people like the aunt herself, her daughter and the daughter’s husband. The teacher wins a lottery and the story revolves around that.
Since it’s quite complicated and interconnected story I wont be writing it down here but it portrays many virtues of human nature like greed, fate, physical desires, relationships, love ect etc. Overall a nice film and worthy of being in competition section.
My Ratings:-4/5

Overall atmosphere at IFFI doesn’t look enthusiastic, atleast as compared to last year. The majority of the delegates are from Goa.  It’s good to see the picture changing with more goan people attending IFFI but it sad they don’t have or rather practice some etiquettes required to be a responsible film viewer which saddens the most. Not keeping the mobile phones on silent mode, moreover talking on the phone while in theater, talking to each other, messing up with seating arrangements and every on the spot nuisance you can think about. It’s not only by Goans but they lead the wagon.
Ok enough for day 1…will be back with more!

 

Update: Day 2 is not worth blogging at all since all the three films which I saw were way too boring and disappointing.

FOSS.IN, IFFI, Theater and much more

Oops! Looks like the vacation is about to end and I managed to get quite a few things which I had decided to do (but not all!). College will open on 24th for 4th Semester and the “sophomore” stage will be in the last chapter finally.
The vacation has been busy busy n busy. Doing stuff on net, fixing Awareness programs for MITRA, getting kicked with rehearsals of an one act play to be staged at a theater festival in Kanakavali Maharashtra at end of december, FOSS.IN 09 preparations and what not.

Going for FOSS.IN/2009 was finalized and got myself registered as a delegate. My main objective there will be to figure out how the contribution process works and meeting and listening some inspiring people whom I have been following on twitter all these days. If you are interested in FOSS and mainly in FOSS contribution, please head to registration page and get yourself registered. From what I have been hearing and reading, you will have your time of life at FOSS.IN/2009….So be there!

IFFI delegateship, as I had presumed, got into some confusion. First they sent me a mail confirming me as a student delegate with no fees. Then they sent me another mail confirming as a normal delegate with Rs.300/- fee. The both emails had two different registration numbers and when tracked my status on their server, both display my status as “Delegate” and not “STUDENT” which they had said in one of their email. The more confusing part is, though both display me as a normal delegate, in the fees section they show as 0.00000, while checked with other normal delegates, it shows them with Rs.300. WTF? So, when I went there, they were not ready to issue me card because I was not a student according to status shown by their server. Now the logic follows that they will abide by the details shown on the follow up data which shows no money to be paid at registration counter, inspite of being delegate. So I will be a delegate without paying any money…enh??? Paying 300 is not an issue. I have always felt that Rs.300 is way to less for an event like IFFI because their SWAG only costs more than Rs.300.
But what concerns me most this year is that I wont be attending it as madly as I had attended it last year. Missing introductory lectures at college can get you in serious troubles and given the fact that I will be almost a week away from college at Banglore for FOSS.IN, the initial attendance is what I just cant sacrifice. So if I was let in for free than I wouldnt have felt much pain of missing some movies.

The rehearsals for the new marathi one act play “Ek Diwane Navthar Gaane” have started off and the casting was finalised just yesterday. This will be performed during december end at Kanakavali Maharashtra for a theater festival which is a retrospective for noted marathi playwright Ratnakar Matkari. We will be performing alongwith some of the giant theater personalities and groups such as Dilip Prabhavalkar, Vikram Gokhale, Avishkar, Maharashtra Cultural Center-Pune to name a few. Really looking forward on this as I am acting as well as designing background music for it alongwith Rohan.

Things are lined up like hell and are of utmost importance. Events like Photography exhibition by MITRA, 60th anniversary celebration of the theater group Hauns started by my grandfather are on line and mean much more to me and making them a huge success is what we are aiming at. And I will be starting with my MCA entrance preparations after the hangover of these events descends so there is no rest as such. Meanwhile might go to Pune for GNUnify in February but that is just a thought as of yet since there have been no formal announcement by PLUG about it.

OK enough personal rant.
Some news to ponder
1) Google Chrome OS source code is released.Boot up time less than 7 seconds on Asus eee PC. First reaction:- Ab tera kya hoga Microsoft and Standalone Applications?
2) I have got 4 Google Wave invites left
3) Pranav Mistry will be releasing Sixth Sense softwares as open source
4) I am about to get my laptop
5) Getting back to cycling
6) An ongoing project on Birds of Karamali lake
7) MITRA hits schools and higher secondaries in Ponda for awareness campaigns (Rohan needs to be applauded for this…and thanks to Azmane High School, Neura and our Alma matter GVM’s Higher Secondary for providing their LCD projectors to carry out the presentations successfully.) More such talks lined up in December as well. The report will be published on MITRA website soon.

Ok bye!
Will be back with some more posts..till than keep reading this!

Update:- I finally got my delegate card and HAD to pay Rs.300/- as I didnt argue much over the issue because the guys there were illogical brats. I asked them to access net which was denied and moreover when I said you check my follow up data infront of me, there were not ready. The delegate card sucks in looks as compared to last year. And this year, sadly we are not provided with lanyards like those of last year’s which Amey was using as keychain. I had promised him to give a new one this year but alas! Sorry Amey

Birding in Bondla

The morning was pleasant like the ones in past. This time I was determined to set out for birding and manage to try my hands on the newly acquired Cannon SX 20 IS by MITRA. The last night’s presentation on Insects by Parag sir was very informative. The night turned out to be special since almost all the past and present volunteers of Mineral Foundation’s nature camp came together at Bondla and it was fun as usual.

The morning began with search for toothpaste and I couldn’t find a tube in anyone’s bag. This is a general story for almost every camp. One out of the dozen volunteers gets a toothpaste tube which is shared by every volunteer for next three days. The same case is with soaps, hair oils and occasionally body sprays. The soap cake gets thinnest, oil pouch drips the last drops of leftover oil and hell lot of fun with body sprays.

With futile peeps into everybody’s bag, I went up to the next dormitory and found one in Parag sir’s pouch and finally managed to brush. My next destination was Canteen, not for breakfast but for birding. Heading alone on Rohan’s bike, I rode straight to canteen with the camera hanging around the neck. I was birding and photographing after a long gap so the excitement was even more.

Canteen Premises

A herd of spotted deers crossed the way. This is an usual sighting in Bondla as the number of antelopes is quite large. I reached canteen within 10 mins and had my time of life after a long gap. The first sighting had to be Jungle Babblers as they are plenty around the canteen. Then there was Tickel’s Blue Fly-catcher, Racket Tailed Drongo, Golden Orioles, Black Drongo, and last but no the least my favourite Mr. and Mrs. Asian Paradise Flycatcher.

Black Hooded Oriole

Since I was operating a camera after so long, the ease of changing settings and selecting priorities had been wiped out. So on one side I was trying to spot the birds which were all around me and on the other side, I was managing them to get in the frame but I sucked at it.
Though the birding was superb, it was a disaster photography with unfocused photos, poor settings, and sometimes even empty frames. Quite in despair, I headed back and thought of going to the waterhole. I met Pankaj and Omkar on the way and I had to stop since Pankaj was recording call of a Rufous Treepie on his bird call recording gear. I had treepie added to my checklist. Heading straight to the waterhole after that, I decided to focus on macro life. I could manage to get some pics of Pigmy Dartlets.

Pigmy Dartlet Mating

It was 9 by then and within a hour, the students for camp would be arriving. The stomach had already started to roar so I headed back to the dormitory to enjoy the Poha and Tea prepared for breakfast calling it a day..errr morning.

Random Updates

This is not a structured post but a random update about what I am upto this days. I really don’t like posting such posts but this time, it’s just for the sake of posting and telling the world that I am still alive and blogging.

• David Shephered, my favourite cricket umpire died. RIP David..all I could do to pay him tribute was to jump like him when the scoreboard hit the 123 mark.
• Karmic Koala is finally here and I already have downloaded the iso. Have to try it out soon.
• My Cyberage PC is kinda behaving odd these days, refusing to boot up quite often. Becchara does too much overwork
• College Council has organised a tour to Mahabaleshwar-Panchagani in mid-Nov. After all that slogging and sleepless nights of this semester, I need a break and will be joining the team.
• I just listed to-do things which  filled a whole notepad page.
• Got my IFFI 09 registration confirmed. And more surprising thing was that I was registered as a student and now I would be getting a free pass and no paying Rs.300 fee this time. The funniest thing that happened is that I sent them the same information which I sent last time with minor changes. But unlike last year, I need not have to pay up anything.
• Deleted my Orkut account. And the mailbox at Yahoo is piling up with re-joining invites. No please…not untill I feel the urge to join it back again.
• Had messed up with the blog themes and header but didnt really workout well so retained the same. Might move to custom domain within next few months.
• Missed the Python Workshop at BITS. Damn sad about it.
• For WAVES, KK and Parikrama will be rocking the pro-nites this time so kinda over-excited to go there.
• The Idiot box at home has sprung back to action after almost 6 years with the re-acquired cable connection. Idea of buying Tata Sky was dropped since the majority of people at home wanted local news channel too.
• Finally managed to get my hands on MITRA’s newly bought Cannon camera. Got some pics from Bonda and missed some awesome shots. After that long gap with photography, I guess I need to brush up and revise my photography skills.

OK enough ranting…there is much more to say but I cant remember things right now. One more thing, i can see my typing speed has fairly improved

Bye n Take care, I am still alive here!

Just recieved my Wave invite from Navin

Early morning today, when I opened my yahoo mailbox, there was something waiting for me, something I wanted to have desperately all these days. yeah you guessed it right..Google Wave account! And I got it..thanks to Navin again..now I owe him something!

Though it looks and sounds all fancy, it is still a preview version and very vague to figure out things but hope soon it will become fully functional.
Wait for the review….till than you can read LifeHacker article about Best Applications/Use cases of Wave here…

Now I am running for examinations!