Isn't it lovely when you are sent by your organization to various conferences and expos. Memories of the
IndLinux developers meet are still fresh in my head. Close on its heels is the latest one on Free and Open Source Sofware, in Bangalore, called
FOSS.IN.
FOSS.IN was a four day event with techinical lectures, turorials, philosophical talks, talks on open source, Open source and India, X and Open source, Y and Open source, Localization, Birds of a Feather, and so on and so forth... (See here fore
schedules)
Day 1Reached Bangalore at around 8am. After convincing the pesky auto-wala that three guys and a girl with all their luggages will not fit into an auto and asking him to leave us alone, we caught a taxi to our appartment, Diamond district (company sponsored ofcourse ;-)
If you think traffic in Bangalore is bad, then you are mistaken. Its horrible. Let me illustrate, our taxi ``reached'' our appartment by around 9am. Well... actually we were in the opposite side of the road and had to take a U-turn to reach our appartment. And thats what we did. Unfortunately, it took us more than 45mins to do that!!!
While on the road I saw some guy sitting in his car reading a novel... whats wrong with it, u ask? Well, HE WAS IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT!!!
We finally reached our appartment, got freshened up and left for the event. It was almost 12 noon when we reached Bangalore Palace, the place where the conference was held. Actually, it was held in the Palace GROUNDS and the palace itself is not... well, a typical palace. Atleast not like the one I had in mind. Anyway, I was glad to see a lot of familiar faces in the conference.
We split up as we can attend more sessions that way. I attended one on Google and Open Source... Not a very interesting one I should say. A lady was speaking about what Google has done for open source. Most part of her speech was on Google's "Summer of code" project. Next, I turned up for a couple of sessions on Debian by Jalder Vyas. A fair, Indian-looking guy with a western accent. I saw him at the IndLinux stall before the session and thought he must be a malayalee. I dunno why but that was my first guess. May be it was his short pony tail or the ''pattai'' in his fore-head. Anyway, I was wrong. He is a Gujrati, a hindu priest by profession, a big techie and a Debian Linux freak (aren't all Debian users freaks?)
After the conference we went for some bowling @ Amoeba in that famous road of B'lore and munched some burgers before that. Later, we had dinner at a resturant which had Amitabachan film posters all over it and a dummy Well (yes the one you take water from) dead center of the restaurant, all in the name of ``ambience''.
Reached the appartment late and the four of us decided to paly some cards. This went on till about 1am the next day before we decided to crash in to our beds.
Day 2The most productive day. Attended a couple of sessions by Rasmous Lerdorf (hope I got that right!) of Yahoo!. He is the creator of the PHP scripting language. Both his sessions were really very good, though he was unable to best present his first lecture due to lack of a network connection in a presentation that dearly needs Internet.
The day drifted with some window shopping at Forums and munching burgers (again!) at McDonald's. The night was again dedicated to cards... only now it was almost 2 am before we called it quits.
Day 3Spent most of the time at IndLinux stall giving a demo or working on the Google quiz.. oops.. I almost forgot. The people at Google gave us a puzzle paper and the winner will get a iPod nano among other prizes. I got the form on the first day and was doing it in parts whenever I found the time. But today was the last day and I had one big problem outta 5 that I was tuck with... after a breaking my head and finally asking the help of my frens (who had already solved it, somehow), I still couldn;t finish it. Whathaheck... I just submitted it.
Attended a few sessiosn.. nothing interesting for moi. The best part of the day however was the Fedora BoF (Birds of a Feather). The great Alan Cox, one of the lead developers of the Linux Kernel and currently working in Redhat, was there. And some of the people I already knew from Redhat India were also there. Had a good discussion with the group and got my self snapped with the big guy himself!!! (@karunakar: Where is my photo???)
Our next stop was Leela palace. It was a seven star hotel but still had a very bad traffic system inside it!!! Sheez. We went for some bowling and pool at Amoeba inside it. After the game (I had a horrible one) we left for dinner (to another palace... what is with these Bangaloreans... everything is a Palace!)
A friend our ours joined us. Her car was parked inside the hotel's parking lot, which by the way is huge.. something like that of Spencers. But unlike Spencers where to exit you bring the car form the top floor to the ground floor, here it is the other way around. As I had said, the traffic was horrible even within the hotel's parking lot. Cars were inching slowly and that too in many palces with a inclination. Now the fun (really funny!) part!
Our car broke down. There were many cars before us in the narrow one-vehicle lane of the parking lot and lotsa cars behind us. And... and... the road was inclined upwards!!! We let our friend be in the wheel and pushed this battered Maruti 800 against the inclined road. After some effor and realising that it is a long way to go before we can find any flat surface, we called for help. One of the driver from the cars behind us offered some help. Still we had to push the car but the cars behind us were asked to wait. Once we covered enuf distance , we let go of the car as it rolled back the driver tried to start the car. After a few tries and exhausting pushes the car roared and left Leela Palace
Had dinner at another palace... went to the appartment... played cards... crashed.
Day 4Attended a sesion of Indic tools and Javascript IME, something that is used by the application build be me and Vignesh. We had taken that tool, customised it heavily and used it in our translation tool. Another session was from a guy from Germany, who was telling how to hack a Motorola mobile with Linux on it.
We left a little early... did not attend the Rock show that was going to be held. Packed our stuff and left for the good, ole H.Y and D.
