Category Archives: Places

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!

Life in the Netherlands

September 29, 2008 By in College, Fun, Life, People, Places Leave a comment

Well, it’s been a whole month since I arrived in Amsterdam, time to reflect on life here so far.

It seems as if everyone here speaks English, so language hasn’t been a problem. Everyday things like buying groceries and asking for directions is not a problem – the only time I wished I knew Dutch was when reading instructions for cooking the noodles I had bought. Solved that problem by manually typing in the instructions on Google Translate :)

I bought an iPhone 3G recently (after a lot of paperwork – the Dutch really seem to like paperwork), so I’ve been trying to translate random dutch words I see just to get a feel of what the language is like. Not that it’s required – anyone can comfortably live in Amsterdam without knowing a single word. Speaking of the iPhone, the 3G network coverage in the city is great and speeds are quite good (unlike the AT&T coverage in the US, from what I hear). A group of international students took a trip to The Hague last week (Den Haag in Dutch, capital of  the Netherlands, pictures here) and I got good network coverage throughout the trip.

Eating out is, unfortunately, quite expensive (compared to India or even the USA). A medium size pizza costs around 10 Euros, so that’s a treat reserved for, say, once a week. That means I would have to cook, but I’ve so far managed to avoid doing that by getting as many ready-to-eat or easy-to-cook packaged foods as I can.

Movies release really late sometimes, so that can be irritating, as an example, ‘Wanted’ came out just last week. Well, atleast they play them in the native language (English), so that’s a consolation.

The weather is quite pleasant, though it rains a lot here, so cloudy days are pretty frequent (which I don’t like). The weather is also quite unpredicatble, you may start your day with sunshine but you’re taught to carry your umbrella/raincoat nevertheless. Waiting to see how cold the winter gets, I’ve heard it doesn’t go as cold as the rest of Europe which is good for me.

The public transportation system is simply fantastic. You buy a paper strip called a strippenkaart and you can use that for travel on all of the cities’ buses, trams and metro. All parts of the city are well connected, and there’s a night bus system for those late party nights (incidentally, Amsterdam’s nightlife is also just as excellent). People here are not as addicted to cars and gas as the Americans – Amsterdam is also known as the bicycle capital of the world. 95% of the streets have a dedicated bike lane and given the relatively small size of the city (atleast compared to what I’m used to) – you don’t need to look further than a bicycle for all your transportation needs in the city. Overall, a pretty active and healthy lifestyle.

Dutch cuisine is not quite famous for anything. This is the first time I’ve had fries with mayonaisse though, and I think I really like it. Stroopwafels are my favorite dutch snack and are ideal anytime of the day with a hot beverage. It’s not hard being a vegetarian here, most restaurants have a variety of options.

The internet speeds are amazing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen bandwidths like these anywhere before 8)

The people are friendly, though my view may be a bit warped because most of the people I interact with are students from the university (and a majority of them are international). It’s amazing though, I’ve met people from more than 30 countries covering all the continents (except for Antarctica, of course), Amsterdam is a really international city.

The university is great, and considerably different from the higher educational institutes in India. The curriculum is pretty flexible, the instructors are open and honest in their handling of the course. Attendance isn’t compulsory, and you can drink coffee in class if you like. Classes are also longer, lasting from 2 to 3 hours with 15 minute breaks in between. Laboratories are well-equipped and nicely maintained by a dedicated IT team. I did hear about all of this, but it’s nice to actually experience learning in an environment like this!

The other big change for me is that I’m meeting students from non-technology backgrounds. Having done my Bachelors in an Engineering college, I’ve grown used to a ‘geeky’ environment which I began taking for granted. It’s refreshing to actually talk to people from other backgrounds like Law, Literature, Finance, Management and Medicine (though I think I’m not very good at this ’socializing’ thingy). Also, the female-male ratio at the university is a LOT higher than what I’m used to – that’s great, right? ;)

Shops close at 6pm most days, except for Thursdays, which is the ’shopping night’. That’s weird though, because everyone has to work on Fridays, why didn’t they pick Friday night? The Dutch also have their parties and get-togethers (or Borrels, as they are called) on Thursday nights. Bah, why not pick a weekend like everyone else in the world :roll:

Well, that’s all I can think of right now. I’m going to try and make the most of my time here! Already have trips planned in October to Barcelona, Spain for MozCamp EU; and Volos, Greece for IWP9.

Until the next post!

Hallo uit Amsterdam!

August 23, 2008 By in College, Fun, Life, People, Places 2 Comments

After a (relatively) short flight, I landed at the Amsterdam Schiphol airport the day before yesterday. I was greeted by a student from the ESN-VUNiverse, who explained the excellent public transportation system of Amsterdam while making the trip back. Getting to Uilenstede (a student housing community in Amstelveen, where I have a room) was a breeze, we reached in just around half-an-hour.

The first thing I noticed about Amsterdam is how much like a city it doesn’t look. It looks more like a quaint little town – there are no huge skyscrapers or crowded streets – overall very pleasing to the eye. The weather is pleasant, but mostly rain and clouds – haven’t seen much sunshine since I got here :(

We arrived at my ‘corridor’, protected by a door of its own. Every corridor has 12 dutch students and 2 international students, sharing a common kitchen. I proceeded to my ‘unit’, which is basically my room – it is a lot bigger and cleaner than my previous room at MNIT.

Internet and Cable were ready to go from the very first day. I’m loving this place :)

Yesterday, we had the ‘Word of Welcome’. I wasted no time in buying a bicycle, the standard transport vehicle in Amsterdam, so my trip to the university was a quick 10 minute ride. Most of the streets in Amsterdam have their own dedicated bicycle paths, complete with their own traffic lights. Bicycle theft, however, is also very common; so common in fact, that some people call it the ‘national sport’!

Immediately after lunch, we had the introduction programme at the faculty of sciences where we got upto speed with all the practical stuff that needs to be done (opening a bank account, registration with the municipality and so on). Then, we got a tour of the faculty: very very impressive! In the evening, we had a small gathering with the staff for drinks: I finally met Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum and Prof. Maarten van Steen :D

Another thing I love about Amsterdam is that everyone speaks excellent English, and they’re not shy of showing off their bilingual skills. That makes it a lot easier for foriegners like us to settle down quickly. I am also trying to learn a few Dutch words though. I’m pretty sure I am going to have a fantastic time for the next two years: the course, the staff, the city, and the people are all top-class.

Classes start on September 1; but meanwhile, ESN-VUniverse has organized a few events that I’ll be attending. This weekend, we are touring Amsterdam, doing a canal cruise, some waterbiking and cycling. See you next post!

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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