I woke up late today and so I missed half of Premshree’s talk on Ruby… … I want to go through the slides when it will be available on the BLUG site. Surprisingly, Pradeep and Vinay too arrived just 5 min after me… not just our interests, but our timings are also similar

Pradeep had to set up PHP and SQLite on Vinay’s laptop and so we were looking for a place to plug the laptop and work on it … then, we bumped into Arun (who was the head of volunteers for LB04) and he showed us the way to the Speakers’ Lounge… we find out where it is on the last day of LB!!

I went to Harish’s talk in the 250-seater hall and took some snaps of him… he was speaking quite well and I sat down to listen to him, although I didn’t originally plan to, since most of what he would speak wouldn’t make much sense to me (I have no idea how the Linux kernel works or how it is structured….)

Then, I got back to the lounge and Pradeep was making changes and preparing… I then got interested in a discussion between Sirtaj and Gopal on DotGNU … and I then realized this was the same Gopal whose name I keep seeing pop up in the DotGNU ‘latest news’ section!! I was overawed by the amount of stuff they’ve gotten working and especially the SWF implementation… Gopal was going to present a talk on DotGNU on Simputer and other embedded systems – now is that cool or what?

I then attended the session on ‘Tales from the Dark Side of the Moon’: what it actually takes to successfully deploy and maintain open source software by Andrew Cowie… I really liked the metaphor of the ‘dark moon’ and he gave an interesting talk on the real world business side to seeing open source software… the gist was that changes keep happening, be it upgrades or patches, etc. and you need your best people working on the sweeping changes that usually happen (as opposed to incremental changes that we assume) and you need the other guys fighting the fires….

Next was Pradeep’s SQLite – he delivered a good interesting talk and I was surprised to know that SQLite supports subqueries which even MySQL 4.0 doesn’t have! I have to take a look at SQLite in future, seems to be an interesting project. Unfortunately, I missed the ‘.NET on Embedded systems’ talk by Gopal which was during the same time..

Then, me and the guys again met up and were just discussing stuff.. the general concensus was that we were missing the ‘Miguel and Nat’ charm of LB2003… but other than that, things were mostly good this year, although there were a few wrinkles.

After that, me and PKG had a great long discussion…. especially where we will be one year from now

Then, I got a call from office, there was an urgent problem that needed fixing… so I went back to yahoo for some fire-fighting…

After my talk, I managed to listen to Sirtaj talking about the future of KDE, especially KDE 4 , although I had missed the first part of his talk because I was talking to people who had listened to my talk and were asking me more about Python…

Then, me and Azmi went to Kiran’s talk on the guts of Python… it was not as advanced as we had hoped it would be and he was going into the nitty gritty details on the syntax, so we went to Shanker’s talk on BSD and that was an interesting talk, although I had some reservations on his bias against Linux but I did agree with him that upgrading stuff on Linux was a PITA…. and FreeBSD totally rocks for a server environment! However, the other side is that more innovation and things happen in the Linux world….

Then, Pradeep, Vinay and myself attended the PHP 5 talk.. which turned out to be more of a press conference than an actual talk, we quickly got bored…. we then went to Philip’s talk on Fallback Messaging, but it was mostly theoritical…. then, me and the guys just met in the hall and we were standing in queue for the LB T-shirts and then headed to the Yahoo pop quiz that we held… it was 20 questions to be answered in about 5 seconds each with the question displayed on the screen… it was fun .. then I helped collect the papers and winners would be announced tomorrow….

Pradeep and Harish, each have a talk tomorrow.

I tried to get some work done yesterday but after a long day and me being the lazy guy that I am, I just went to sleep after getting back… I woke up today morning and started working on the slide and had a few more practical examples comparing some Perl vs Python code and so on… I finally complete some changes, although quite not satisfied but I thought the slides, as they are, will have to just do.

Then, suddenly, there’s a power cut!! The horror! I had enough sense to mail the ppt to myself but didn’t have enough UPS backup to burn the presentation and programs to a CD ..

So, I got ready and was hoping that some cyber cafes would be open at 9 am, so that I could take my presentation on a floppy … my talk’s at 10 am! And just then, the power came back. Relieved, I burnt the stuff to a CD and rushed to the IISc campus.

I arrived at 9.50 am (traffic was heavy, as usual) and found out that my talk (and other talks in the same track) were shifted to the 60-seater Hall C for reasons unknown .. Vinay had brought his cool laptop so that I could do my presentation with it.. he was kind enough to get all the Python, wxPython and other stuff installed on it yesterday. Thanks, Vinay. There were some initial problems connecting the laptop to the projector but it was solved quickly. So, the talk started at 10.10 am… I just started, introduced myself, mentioned my book and got the Python talk going …. I explained the whole deal- What is Python? Why Python? Who uses it? What’s so special about it? How does it look like? and so on…. 20 min later, people are still listening to me!

I went on and gave lots of examples on the basic syntax and stuff of what you would learn in any new language … I continued giving some examples on how Python code looks like and what makes it so ‘readable’. Then, I gave demos on wxPython and explained the Twisted and Jython and IronPython software and how it is useful. Twisted wasn’t installed on the system, so I couldn’t demo but I did talk about it and showed the screenshot along with code. Jython didn’t have Swing installed but again I managed with the screenshot along with code.

This was followed by a Q & A session… the audience asked many questions… always a good sign… I think I was able to answer them appropriately.

Some people met me outside the hall (Kenneth started talking on web programming using Python) and some even mentioned that they have read my book and they liked it

All in all, things did finally go well. I knew I had spoken quite well but I had a feeling I spoke a bit fast. I got feedback later from lots of people that I maintained a reasonable pace and kept the audience involved throughout the whole session and they did show signs of interest in trying out Python after they went back home… which was the whole point of the session! So, I was happy things turned out well

Update

Talk details are put up at the LB site.

Slides available

Download the slides in case you were not able to attend my talk!

Day 1 started with the inauguration of Linux Bangalore/2004 . LB doesn’t have the concept of chief guests, but the chief guest is the audience and so the representatives of various LUGs across India lighted the lamps, on behalf of the audience, to inaugurate the beginning of 3 days of LB2004.

Then, Atul explained how the BLUG logo and the LB2004 logo were created. The BLUG logo consists of different colored lines drawn in waves to give the effect of looking like a globe… this emphasizes many qualities of BLUG – open, techie, catering to the world and with Indian flag colors to indicate the Indian touch to it.

The LB2004 logo consists of the words LINUX BANGALORE/2004 made from photos of the past 3 years of LB to indicate that LB is really for the people, by the people and of the people

Then, we attended Brian Behlendorf’s (the guy who started the Apache project!) session on open source and what makes it tick… he emphasizes the key innovations by open source communities are code, community and context – the open code allows to build upon it, and to reuse and modify it and to fix bugs. The community develops knowledge and allows one to connect to it in a very easy way. The context of CVS ChangeLog and mailing list discussions lead to a history. These 3 qualities are what makes open source unique and what makes it tick… along with this, there are 3 principles that need to be followed – transparency, association of code to individuals and accessibility.

This was followed by a talk on ‘GPL is not public domain’ by Harald Welte (of netfilter/iptables fame) and he gave many insights which I was completely unaware of, such as – small bugfixes in code are not copyrightable… GPL is about distribution, not usage … and in simple words, the intent of the license is to enable the user to run modified versions of the program.

Next, was Behlendorf giving an introduction on Subversion – interesting to note the wide range of features that Subversion has and seems to be very robust. The Mono project recently shifted to svn from cvs and that surely gives confidence to many people about the viability of svn.

Then, I attended the talk on SCons – a replacement for Make. It was a very engaging session and I liked the fact that the equivalent of Makefiles are just simple Python scripts!

I had to go office to clear any backlog of work and so, unfortunately, had to miss the talk on Parrot (which was supposed to be before the SCons talk, but was postponed due to some technical problems)…

Thinking about Subversion and SCons… amazing stuff… next generation software that replaces old but true-and-tested software… boy, the software world just moves at such a rapid pace…. this is why this profession gives me a high everyday

Have to prepare for my talk tomorrow at 10 am!

I got back on Saturday night from the Yahoo Year End Party and it was just way 2 cool…

We had left from our office on Thursday night in 4 buses… about 120 people in total I guess … Having worked all night on the day before on this new blog site, I fell asleep immediately… next thing I wake up and I see we’re somewhere near Chennai, waiting for the other buses to catch up (and we waited for a very long time) and it’s raining in Chennai! I didn’t expect that… then we finally reached the resort at 10 am. All yahoos were divided into groups of 6-7 and we had a ‘captain’ for each of them who was responsible for ensuring that we’re all together/safe/etc…. well organized, I must say.

Then, we checked in to our rooms… me and Vinoth headed straight for the swimming pool… many were there… I just love swimming lengths and did so for quite a while. Then, we started the old-but-cool game of throwing in a coin and scampering to find and pull it at 7 ft depth and eventually played pool basketball as well…

Then we had a late breakfast and we had an emcee who was getting us involved in team games and it was kinda ok. Then we went to the beach to splash in the waves! That was so much fun. We also played beach volleyball, football, handball,… I had a good lunch and just went and sat in the shade near the beach just watching the vast water body.. and next thing I know I had drifted off asleep…

In the evening, we had a great lineup of events – there was a skit (by our Chennai Colleagues) where Munnabhai, BE wants to become part of Yahoo ..! , and a dance program and followed by the highlight of the evening – each and every manager in Yahoo came forward to do a bit of dance to his/her fave song. They really did well!

Finally, we had cocktails and dinner and then we boogied to the disco! I danced for about an hour and finally got exhausted. After that, me, Yashwanth and Dinesh (a new friend I made in the trip!) sat on the beach and had a great conversation about… well, let’s just say we talked about lotsa things. After about two hours, there, we could hear the disco songs still going on and yahoos are still jiving. Great energy!

Around midnight, we went to our respective rooms and hit the bed with exhaustion. What a great day! We had planned to wake up early the next day to get good snaps of the sunrise…

I had set the alarm at 4 am (believe it or not!) and I actually did wake up. I went to the beach, sat there, listening to the howling winds, sitting in the darkness, alone in my thoughts…. life seemed so right, my brain was working at lightning speed and I just was planning so many things about what I wanted to achieve in the future…. amazing that the right kind of environment and solitude and peace of mind can give you tremendous inspiration

I was waiting to get a good glimpse of the sunrise, but was ultimately disappointed, along with many other people, when the clouds had blocked the sun out and the sun eventually rose over the clouds. I so badly wanted a snap of the sun coming just over the water… that would’ve been cool.

Finally, we landed back in the pool and had a last hour of splash before we had to board the bus and come back home…

While I was going back to my room, Sarika (our HR) asked me ‘Why are you looking so lost?’ … I immediately joked ‘Because we have to get back today’… only later I realized how true that was! When things are going good and you are having fun, you just don’t want it to stop… it’s like – once we are in fast motion, we hate to slow down!

We had fun even in the 8 hour journey… I slept a bit and then listened to Bryan Adams’ ‘Room Service’ (thanks to Sehgal) – I really liked that song ‘Open Road’ – …. "Life is an open road… it’s the best story never told… it’s the endless sky… it’s the deepest sea… life is an open road to me…"

Towards the end of our journey, there was invariably a techie discussion going a few seats ahead of me… and me being the geek, got tempted and joined them… so there we were – Ankit, Suraj, Ashish, Sudhir and myself – we were discussing MySQL, Postgres, VIM, some internal Yahoo tools, … the best part was when Prem’s daughter 5-6 year old daughter Alisha soon joined us and she had her own story to tell us… it seems a small lady came down to meet her and she visually showed her hand to describe how really ‘small’ that lady was … and it seems that lady tried to climb a tree but fell down… and soon went back up in the sky… is that some imagination or what?!

Heh heh. Then we finally land back in Bangalore at 8 pm in front of our office. I took out my bike and went home – where my aunt & family have come back from Australia and all our cousins had got together… it was nice to meet all of them after such a long time.

Another great day…. !

Update

I have put up the photos now ! Coppermine software is cool

Check out my favorite picture of the sunrise – it’s my wallpaper now!