Category Archives: Conferences

EU_MozCamp and Friends

November 3, 2008 By in Conferences, FOSS, Fun, Life, Mozilla, People, Places, Technology 1 Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the past few weeks, starting with the really exciting “Northside Weekend” at the Dutch towns of Tolbert and Groningen. Copious amounts of embarrassing pictures were generated on Facebook: I wouldn’t expect any less from a group of 60 students hanging out over the weekend :)

Allowing for just enough time to recover, I had to write my final exam for the Parallel Programming course. Having courses compressed into such short time periods can be both and good and bad, I guess I will decide for myself when the results come in!

I left almost immediately after the exam to catch a flight to Barcelona, for EU MozCamp 2008. There was a Labs Session at the Facultat d’informàtica de Barcelona the next day, part of Dan and Aza’s Europe tour. I managed to reach just before the session ended, thanks to me getting lost and then someone pointing me to a different place in the opposite direction. thunder, aza and myself then traversed the excellent Metro system in the city, to catch up with cbeard for lunch. I had my first experience with Tapas, and it wasn’t bad at all – the fact that thunder knows spanish helped a lot. mconnor joined us shortly after. A fabulous dinner later, we were all set for the first day of MozCamp :)

Most Mozilla events are all about meeting new people and catching up with people you knew already. I made the most of it, it was nice to see faces back from Mountain View, and some new ones. Aza was scheduled for a Labs keynote on the first day, which was pretty good. Unfortunately, he seemed to have contracted food poisoning, or maybe just general exhaustion and insomnia from the whole Labs Europe tour; so they postponed the session on Ubiquity to the next day. David Ascher‘s talk was fantastic with some really cool demos, Thunderbird 3 is going to be prodigious! We had a session on Weave that evening, which also went off reasonably well, though the audience seemed more focused on the legal and privacy aspects of the project. Not a bad thing, just not interesting to me – I’d rather think and talk about technical challenges ;)

I had the wonderful opportunity to have dinner with Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. I also met up with Suneel who had just recently joined Mozilla at Mountain View, and we all had a great time! mconnor had to stay awake a little later than the rest of us, to prepare for his talk the next day.

Highlights of Day 2 were mconnor’s talk, 2010 goals discussion and the session on Ubiquity. I also had a brief discussion with Dan on some of my plans for Weave 0.3, it’s going to be awesome! Labs team did a little sightseeing that night, and then caught up with John Lilly, accompanied by his wife, for dinner. A perfect end to an excellent weekend.

Thanks Mozilla Europe, and Barcelona!

The FOSS.IN/08 Omelette

October 2, 2008 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Technology 3 Comments

Atul recently posted an update on why FOSS.IN/08 is going to be a lot different than previous incarnations. This has already caused a bit of a stir in the both the Indian and International FOSS communities, just going to chip in with a few thoughts.

The goal of the conference seems to be encouraging Indians to create innovative pieces of free and open source software, rather than just contributing tiny bits by doing jobs “no one else wants to do”; read packaging for distros and localization. First off, that is just downright insulting to everyone who has being helping out in those areas so far – undoing months of evangelism in just one sentence. I understand that FOSS.IN isn’t about evangelism and philosophy, but I think it is a bit much to actively undo work that others have been doing. FOSS.IN is India’s largest conference on free and open source software that fair amount of people look upto – a statement like that from the team runs the risk of pushing potential localizers away – harming the FOSS ecosystem rather than helping it. I am sure that’s not the intention of the team, but “low-hanging fruit” is a poor choice of words at best. It’s fine to change the focus of the conference, but it’s possible to have done that without labeling other aspects of FOSS that you don’t want your conference to be about.

The second thing that puzzles me is the choice of putting the “spotlight on Indian contributors”. Given the goal of encouraging more Indians to make significant contributions to FOSS, I don’t see how eliminating international speakers helps. FOSS.IN, being hosted in Bangalore, is going to attract only Indians as delegates, why does it matter if the speakers are Indian or not? I am sure delegates at the conference care more about what the speaker is talking about rather that his/her nationality. In fact, nationality isn’t even relevant to FOSS in any manner. If the number of talks by Indians was seriously low last year, I don’t forsee much change this year either – simply because there are more contributors who are not Indian – a “problem” that FOSS.IN wants to “fix”; but again, how does selecting fewer talks help achieve that? Also, if there are going to be fewer foriegners at the event, why bother organizing “light Indian entertainment”? ;-)

Lastly, I see FOSS.IN is drastically narrowing down on its target audience. In fact, I think there is nobody who falls under the category of the ideal participant in FOSS.IN/08. The conference is not for the “newbies”, it’s not for those who wish to help with localization, but rather for those who already possess the technical skills to contribute “significantly” to FOSS. Now, if they bothered to register for FOSS.IN as a delegate, they obviously know what open source is about and have initiative. Given all these conditions, I am sure they already have everything they need to start contributing, why do they need to attend the conference?

In the end, is FOSS.IN/08 just a giant hackathon? Where people just sit down and write code? You don’t need an elaborate 5 day “conference” hosted in Bangalore to do that.

</rant>

I do look forward to the results of this massive “experiment” :-)

Of bears, landslides, powercuts and cancelled flights

August 3, 2008 By in Conferences, Food, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Life, Mozilla, People, Photos, Places Leave a comment

Bear with me for this long post (no pun intended) describing the awesome Mozilla Summit at Whistler. The short version is that it was supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous. Ok, that’s a nonsense word but there’s no way I can put the experience in just one word :-)

Monday
All the interns got up fairly early to catch a shuttle to SFO, and we arrived in Whistler after a pleasant 3 hour flight and 2 hour bus ride from YVR. The scenery was fantastic all along the way, and the hotel was overwhelmingly comfortable. Nothing much happened except meeting some familiar as well as new people at dinner.

Tuesday
First day of the summit started off with keynotes by John Lilly and Mitchell Baker. Mitchell’s analogy of what she thought of Mozilla was especially intriguing. A great way to kick-off the sessions that were to follow over the next few days. The UX talk on the history and future of browsers was especially a good one. Highlight of the day was Gary spotting bears. Apparently, there were a few that were brave enough to jump into the room balconies too.

Wednesday
I spent most of the early part of the day in the Emerald room, attending sessions on Mozilla’s Technology roadmap, Fennec and the Labs concept series. I ended the round of session-attending with Myk’s talk on Snowl, which is another cool labs project (well, all labs projects are cool!).

The big news of the day was the rockslide on the road connecting Vancouver with Whistler. ~350 at the summit suddenly had to change travel plans to accomodate for this… um… natural disaster. The contingency plan involved 8-hour long bus rides on a longer, more scenic route or float planes.

The labs team spent wednesday night hacking at Chris’ room, in preparation for our presentations the next day. Prior experience led us to believe that relying on the WiFi network in the hotel was probably not a wise idea for our demos, so I setup a local weave sever with a few demo accounts and changed the bookmark sharing code to not depend on XMPP to notify the receving user of the share. It was 3 am by the time I got to sleep so I responsibly set an alarm because the weave talk was the first one on the next day.

Thursday
Except the alarm didn’t go off, and I woke up 45 minutes after the scheduled time for the session. My first reaction was along the lines of oops, I screwed up. But as I became fully awake I realized there was no power in the entire hotel and breathed a sigh of relief because all the morning sessions were postponed. So the story was that a laundry truck ran into a transformer and it would take a few hours for power to be restored.

The Labs sessions were moved to a conference room run by our friendly neighbors (The Hilton), and we started off shortly after lunch. The Labs sessions on Weave and Ubiquity went off really well and I think they created a lot of buzz. Especially with ubiquity, some of the demos were mind-blowing!

Though I really wanted to attend the session on HG, I decided to take a nap instead and prepare myself for the grand dinner atop Whistler-Blackcomb (which are, incidentally, codenames for Windows editions). The dinner was a fine end to a fine summit, and I was especially excited to experience snowfall for the first time in my life :-)

My plan to get back home was to catch a Floatplane with the rest of Labs the next morning, in time for the YVR-SFO flight at 3 pm.

Friday
But NO. All the floatplanes had been cancelled due to fog and low tides, so Dan & Chris put me up on the last bus out of Whistler at 11 am, and kindly provided a goodie bag full of food and coffee for my 8 hour bus ride.

The ride itself was not bad at all, the scenery on the way was well worth it. As we approached Vancouver (around 6:30 pm), Melissa Shapiro found me on the bus and informed me that she would try to catch the 8:15 pm flight to SFO (which was the last one out of YVR) and recommended I do the same. The bus didn’t go to the airport, but to the Sheraton at Wall centre instead, so Melissa and I took a cab and rushed to the airport.

We managed to get standby tickets on the plane, and went through US immigration, customs and security check (where I was “selected for random screening”). We did make it to the gate on time, but not on the plane. Technically, I had to re-enter Canada through immigration, but I had a single-entry VISA. Thankfully, Melissa was there to vouch for me, so I was able to make it back in.

Chris had rooms for us at the Sheraton and we headed back. After a great dinner with Bret, Brad, Melissa, Chris and Dan, I tucked in for the night watching Vancouver’s great skyline.

Saturday
Quite an uneventful day, considering the last week, because everything went as planned. All of us had confirmed tickets on the 11 am flight to SFO.

Melissa, Chris and I stopped for a while at Stanley Park on our way to the Aiport, while Dan had to leave early because he had to pick up his bag and passport (which he left at the party on Thursday, there’s another whole story!)

Phew
Well, I’m back in Mountain View now; and only have a week more to go. I’m really going to miss everyone, and the summit just made it a whole lot harder for me to say goodbye. But as Chris Hoffman had said in a brown-bag sometime ago: “This is Hotel Mozilla – you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!”

Just want to convey a big Thank You to everyone at Mozilla; especially Dan Portillo, Tiffney Mortensen, John Lilly, Julie Deroche, Melissa Shapiro, Maria Emerson, and most of all, Chris Beard, for making my experience at the summit an experience of a lifetime!

(Pictures up on Flickr)

The week before the Summit

July 28, 2008 By in Conferences, Fun, Life, Mozilla, People, Places Leave a comment

Time for a quick update on what I’ve been upto this week…

Let’s start with the Intern BBQ – I guess the highlight of the event was Schrep almost being thrown into the pool, I think David sums it up quite nicely. I left the same night for L.A. – the primary item on my agenda was to attend Russell Peters and Friends at the Grove of Anaheim. The show was great, he didn’t repeat any of his old jokes and we had 3 other comics (as Russell called them) – all of them kept us laughing for over 2 hours.

I spent all of Sunday at Universal Studios, Hollywood – which was also great fun. The studio tour, ‘Water World’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ attractions were especially worth it. I caught a Greyhound back to San Jose and headed straight to work.

Week 10 was spent in finishing up the OAuth implementation for Weave – both server-side and client-side. I also wrote a PHP library to access a user’s Bookmarks and open Tabs via OAuth. We had a small demo at the third edition of Labs Night (which was held on Thursday, Jono gives a more detailed account). As we get closer to unrolling both the Weave web client and the OAuth API, I’m looking to forward to some great mashups from third party developers :-)

Maria, Rob, Paul and I spent saturday touring the vineyards and hills of Santa Cruz…

Now, we have a plane to catch in about 7 hours for what is poised to be a climax of gargantuan proportions for my summer. Keep track of what’s going on at Whistler at Summitr. Needless to say, I’m super-excited!

Labs night

June 26, 2008 By in Conferences, FOSS, Hacks, Mozilla, Places, Technology Leave a comment

Yesterday, we had the first in a series of monthly events organized by Mozilla Labs. I don’t think we have a name for it yet, but given the informal nature of the event, ‘Labs Night’ is a good enough name as any.

The event consisted of Pizza arriving at around 6:00 pm, followed by a series of lightning talks which began at around 6:20. Chris began with a brief introduction to the Labs team, followed by him and Dan giving the audience an overview of what Weave was all about and the general direction in which we hoped to take it.

The rest of the Weave lightning talks were actually demos, starting with Maria’s presentation of the new setup wizard, which streamlines the whole first-run experience for the user. Myk then gave us a neat demo of tab syncing and notification system, followed by another cool demo from Jono showing us how a user can share his bookmarks with another Weave user. Atul then gave us an overview of the testing framework currently in use by Weave. I ended the series of lightning talks on Weave with a demo of the web client, the decryption part of which I had just finished a day before. I also managed to get the client to run on the iPhone simulator (part of the iPhone SDK), albeit in unencrypted mode.

We then had Alex Faaborg give us a presentation on what Microformats were and why they are useful and important for users of the modern web. This was followed by a really cool demo of a prototype user interface for Mobile Firefox (codenamed ‘Fennec’) by Aza.

I really liked the informal setting of the whole event, and we had people asking some really good questions, and generally commenting throughout all the talks which was pretty cool. I’m looking forward to more of these events (though I may be able to attend only one more – the one in July – which will probably take place at Whistler!).

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