Category Archives: FOSS.IN

FOSS.IN 07: Day 4

December 7, 2007 By in College, Conferences, Food, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Fun, Gentoo, Mozilla, Plan9, Programming, Technology Leave a comment

Day 4 was like another Mozilla project day for us. We arrived at the venue at 10:00 sharp and headed towards the hack center for the Mozilla hackathon. After checking out the Mozilla sources, we began looking for bugs that would be easy to solve. We did find two of them from the ‘Good First Bugs‘ page and actually found another bug that Prasad filed. Myk led us through the entire process of finding out the source that was causing the bug, zeroing in on a fix, creating a patch and getting the patch checked in. This was the very first bug I had squashed on Mozilla, and we learnt a lot about the whole Mozilla review process.

After lunch we attended Mitchell Baker‘s talk on the Mozilla project. I didn’t know that the Mozilla Corporation was actually Not-for-profit, which is really cool. Immediately after Mitchell’s talk we attended Myk’s talk on ‘Hacking the Fox‘ – in which he interactively went through the process hacking on Firefox without checking out the sources. He solved bug #189290 and submitted a patch during the talk, showing everyone what exactly the whole process looked like.

I couldn’t be at the Gentoo stall the whole time, but during the small periods I was, there was a really good crowd around it. I think the stall was a huge success for us, and we were able to distribute LiveCD’s and Minimal x86 CD’s of the 2007.0 release yesterday.

At around 17:00, the lightning talk sessions began, and it turned out to be really popular! A lot of people came on stage to speak about anything under the sun for 3 minutes which was awesome. I gave a lightning talk on the ‘lightning talk timer’ I had hacked up for the event. It was just a whole lot of fun and we’re going to be having another session today.

Axel, Myk, Chris, Prasad, Rahul & Myself then left the venue for some typical Indian street-food at Gangotree. We had expected a place where we could sit and eat, but the nearest one turned out to be a small stall. We ate some Paapdi Chaat (which they couldn’t really swallow!), Pani Puri, Besan Laddoo and Badam Burfi nevertheless – which was a nice experience for the Mozilla folks. Mary couldn’t make it because she was busy trying to get the Mozilla t-shirts out of customs (she eventually succeeded – Yay!).

Well, that’s about it – I’m looking forward to the final day of FOSS.IN – we have some really interesting talks lined up for today. It’s been one hell of a ride so far!

FOSS.IN 07: Day 3

December 6, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Gentoo, Glendix, India, Linux, Mozilla, People, Plan9, Programming, Technology Leave a comment

Day 3: The first day of the main conference. We thought we were running late (left home only at 09:50 after getting our Gentoo T-Shirts on) but the inauguration ceremony started half-hour late (as usual!) so we were able to catch the whole action. After FOSS.IN/2007 was kicked off by Atul & Kishore, Naba Kumar came up to give the keynote on Anjuta DevStudio. I didn’t know the origin of the name Anjuta earlier, but it was certainly fascinating :)

I had my talk on contributing to Gentoo right after the keynote, and we started at 11:30 on the dot (the schedules in other rooms were on-time). Gora gave an excellent introduction, and I began speaking to a somewhat-filled room about the different entry points to Gentoo development. The audience were really interactive and the questions were brilliant – this is something that I really liked about this years edition of FOSS.IN. There was a lot more interest in Gentoo than I had originally anticipated and it was nice to see our stall really crowded immediately after the talk. Hopefully, we’ve brain-washed atleast two-dozen people into using Gentoo :)

The remainder of the day was spent talking to people who approached our stall – it got a bit monotonous though, answering the same question “Why is Gentoo different?” over and over again. We’ve decided to print out an FAQ poster and put it up to make things a little more easier for us ;)

I had my third talk on Plan 9 from Bell Labs scheduled in the evening, right beside some really interesting stuff including the talk on PulseAudio and the lightning talk session. Again, I really didn’t expect much of a crowd for my talk, but I was happily mistaken. The room was not only full, but there were also people seated on the stairs and near the door! The talk went off really well, and I think it was *the* best talk I’ve delivered so far. The crowd was really smart and it was fun to interact with such an audience.

We’ve planned to have a small Mozilla hack-a-thon today, let’s see how that goes. Besides that I’ve planned to attend a few other interesting talks. Looking forward to keeping the pace up, I’ll catch you all tomorrow!

FOSS.IN 07: Day 2

December 5, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Fun, Gentoo, India, People, SoC, Technology Leave a comment

We reached a little late for Day 2, because there were no talks in particular that we had wanted to attend. After reaching the venue at around 11:00, the first thing we did was to distribute the Gentoo t-shirts so folks could wear them today (the t-shirt needs one wash before wear). Shyam (fox2mike) had brought the Gentoo banner so we set that up in the stall.

G0SUB and myself then attended pradeepto’s talk on setting up a KDE development environment. This was followed by an amazing demonstration of dtrace by the one and only GMan (Glynn Foster from Sun/GNOME). dtrace is really powerful, although I keep hearing about it, yesterday was the first time I actually understood how useful it is.

After lunch, I attended Debarshi’s talk on Opyum, his summer of code project for this year. Also got to meet a bunch of other SoCers and we’ve all planned a SoC BoF along with a few mentors who are also present at the event.

Then we got busy distributing invites for the Mozilla party, and hung out with the Mozilla gang until it was time to leave. The party was at Opus which was a nice place with good (loud) music :) . The karaoke was a big hit. After meeting a lot of people and having some good discussion, I decided to call it a day (I had two talks to prepare for!).

Day 3 begins in a few hours – both my talks are today and we’re going to kick off the Gentoo stall, so I’m really excited. See you tomorrow with another update!

FOSS.IN 07: Day 1

December 4, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Gentoo, India, Life, Mozilla, People, Technology Leave a comment

Quick update on the first day at FOSS.IN. We reached the venue at around 09:00 – the stalls were the first thing that caught my eye (especially the Sun & Google ones). After about 20 minutes of frantic organizers moving all over the venue at lightning speeds, all the speakers got registered and we moved to SDA/250 for the Mozilla PD.

We started a little late – around 10:30 as opposed to 10:00. After brief introductions by Mary, Myk kicked off the project day with an excellent overview of the add-on scenario in Mozilla. This was followed by Prasad’s talk on building applications on the Mozilla platform. The calculator example – complete with it’s own add-on manager (for adding scientific support) – was a great way of giving the basics of Mozilla application development as was the highlight of the tutorial.

I gave the next talk on writing add-ons with JavaScript using XPConnect. Prasad and Myk had already covered a lot of ground on the basics of add-on and application development, so I was able to wrap up my talk in about half an hour – bringing us right back on schedule ;)

The last talk of the first half was given by Mary which focussed on the various non-technical ways in which you could help Mozilla. The talk brought to light a lot of cool activities Mozilla was involved in. We broke for lunch at exactly 13:00, promising to meet back at 14:00 for the second half. Mary also kept a lot of Mozilla swag at the entrance of the hall – which included badges, mobile holders, tattoos, stickers and wrist bands. The crowd was ecstatic about them and needlessly to say that they were a great hit.

At lunch we caught up with a lot of other FOSS friends from #linux-india. Aanjhan transferred the Gentoo stickers which he kindly volunteered to print, and we hope to setup the Gentoo stall today so that we’re ready for tomorrow. I finally met G0SUB in real life, took me some time to recognize him because of the shaven beard though :)

Post lunch we began with Krishnakant’s talk on accessibility in Mozilla, which as Gora said was an eye-opener is many ways for all of us. I was really impressed with the level of accessibility that the Gnome environment and Mozilla Firefox provided to the disabled. We discussed some ways in which accessibility could improve in Mozilla applications.

The next talk was by Axel, which was about Localization in Mozilla. The coolest part of the talk was when Axel fixed a bug on localization (though it was ultimately closed as a WONTFIX!) because it gave a very good overview to the audience about the life-cycle of a bug. The final talk of the project day was by Chris Hoffman, which was about QA in Mozilla and how you can contribute to these areas which require some technical skills – “for people in the middle”.

We rounded off the project day with about an hour of one-on-one discussion with all the Mozilla folks, which was, in my opinion, the best part of the project day because we got to discuss a variety of topics (not only related to Mozilla or Technology even). We also decided to have a hack session for Mozilla, which would be tentatively on the 7th at the hack center.

After all the dust settled, we packed up around 18:30 and a group of around 12 went for dinner to “Sunny’s”, a nice Italian restaurant. Discussion on virtually everything ranging from food to movies and dtrace to macports ensued and we were done by around 21:00. After reaching home I just fell on my bed and now here I am, all geared up for FOSS.IN: Day 2! :)

Karunakar posted a few pics of Day 1 here, check them out.

FOSS.IN 07: Day 0

December 3, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Mozilla, People, Technology Leave a comment

FOSS.IN is here. Finally.

I had been to the venue yesterday and I caught up with plenty of people, besides helping stuff the delegate kits with plenty of goodies (which I’m sure all the delegates will love). The venue looks great, the halls are awesome, and the excitement is high… I can’t wait to get started.

Later I caught up with all the folks speaking at the Mozilla Project Day for Dinner at the Tandoor – I met Prasad, Krishnakant, Mary, Axel, Chris and Myk – all for the first time which was really nice.

Looking forward to a great day today, and I’ll keep posting events as they happen.

Random Thoughts

December 20, 2006 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, India, Life, PHP-GTK Leave a comment

Wow, been over a month since I last updated the blog. Somehow I just keep forgetting that I have one to update, even if there’s so much to tell!

FOSS.IN was organized to be held Nov 24th – 26th, and it was a resounding success. I wasn’t able to attend it (because of my final semester examinations) but from what I hear it was pretty good. Spending a little while on the #linux-india room of Freenode brought to my attention a certain controversy surrounding Atul Chitnis, a prominent FOSS evangelist in India. So if you want the grimy details; you should read this, this and this. I took up the issue with him on the Wikipedia talk page for FOSS.IN and as you’ll see; things are back to normal now :)

Christian got this nice idea of mapping PHP-GTK users on a map. The idea was soon extended to PEAR too and here’s the result. Talking of PHP-GTK, it seems that interest in the project has really grown. The number of people on the #php-gtk channel on Freenode now touched a double-digit number, and we now have our very own community site. PHP-GTK 2 even has a framework called Callicore for you to work with!

Linkblogs are turning out to be popular. Or as Wikipedia calls it, a Linklog. Considering I don’t maintain bookmarks (hell, I don’t even have digg account yet!); I don’t think I’ll maintain one, atleast in the near future.

The GNU Parted developer mailing list had some interesting discussions in the recent past. We also moved to using Git for version control, and it’s really fun to use! Debarshi Ray, a student from NIT Hamirpur (from what I could gather; they even have their own GLUG) made some useful contributions and earned himself commit rights. The project finally has enough developers to give it some momentum and all focus is on 2.0; codenamed “Edge”. I managed to get Trac up and running on Alioth so that we could have a Wiki, and it was simply hell. I’m still waiting for the Alioth admins to come and revoke my shell account ;)

And now, for the eternal question. Is Flash evil? So it’s not an open standard and all, but I was very impressed with what Flex can do. As a web developer I think it’s a really promising platform for you to be building your web applications in. (Students: Have a look at Adobe India’s developer olympiad if you’re interested in Flex). If you’re a FOSS fanatic, have a look at OpenLaszlo; it’s pretty amazing too. Especially the fact that they’re working on a pure Javascript output in addition to traditional flash under “Project Legals”.

Stuart Herbert, my mentor during this years Summer of Code; announced his resignation to the Gentoo Council on 29th November. It was sad to see him go; but ah well. My new mentor for the Gentoo recruitment process is spb (also known as Stephen Bennett). It’s nice to work with him, and I’ve made it past the ebuild quiz. Got to get cracking on the end quiz, which isn’t as easy as the first one!

I’m right now in the beautiful campus of IIT Kanpur. I’ve come here to attend a 3-day workshop on algorithms for data streams; and I must say that 2 days into the workshop, I’ve already picked up so much. I’m lucky to be amongst the Crème de la Crème of the data streams scenario, and it’s been an amazing experience so far. I leave tomorrow, and shudder to think of the 40 hour train journey from New Delhi to Bangalore which I have to spend all alone!

Anyway, if you’re looking for something really funny to read (FOSS enthusiasts only!), you have to check out this webcomic. It’s a must read!

I guess that’s it for now. So until next time, keep smiling!

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