Yesterday night, I met St. John Goldfinger and Paul Jenkins for dinner. They are technology entrepreneurs based in the UK. They were in Bangalore for the EU-Karnataka Asia IT Enterprise 2006 Conference (quite a mouthful) basically looking out for companies to collaborate with on many of their projects. They wanted to meet few of the local people to understand the IT scene in Bangalore and India, and for some reason they had found me.

We had a very varied discussion from normal jobs vs your own company to software piracy to skydiving. St. John started out his career as an IT consultant and realized that “everyday was just like any other day” and decided that a normal job wasn’t for him, so he and a group of friends got together and started their own company and have been working on almost any kind of work from web design work (which earns their bread right now) to many ideas they think that’ll make it big.

One such idea is Kid-Safe. In countries like UK and USA, children have become addicted to the computer and internet and it’s very difficult for parents to control the usage, so Kid-Safe consists of a special software on a dongle which allows you to login to the computer only when the dongle is plugged into the USB port. This way, the kids usage can be controlled. They believe there’s a huge market for such a product. Personally, this idea was a bit strange to me at first because we don’t have such problems in India yet, but I could see why it can be such a problem in UK – after all, on an average, they have a computer for each person in the home and most children have computers in their own rooms.

I was asking him about how they come up with these ideas, and they said that’s what they love to do – ‘keep ideating’, and how do they do that? By constantly visiting new places and interacting with new people and trying to understand if there are technical problems they can solve. St. John has travelled all over the world – Eastern Europe, South Africa, China, US, and now India. It was interesting to hear about his observations of the people in different countries.

One of the things that we discussed was that St. John is looking out for some people here in India to oursource some of their work and he said he was finding it extremely difficult to find good people. They are looking to outsource two kinds of work – web-devel work which involves PHP/HTML/CSS/Apache/etc. and the other which involves C++ Programming, especially with Vista in mind. If you know anybody who would be interested in such kind of work (St. John has a very attractive pay offer in mind), please contact him directly (stjohn -at- softwareassociates -dot- nu).

We also discussed about cycling, trekking and outdoor activities, and I told him that Karnataka is one of the best places for such activities. One of St. John’s passion is skydiving – “Skydiving is one of my favourite hobbies, I have done about 100 jumps from around 12,000ft. You fall for around 40-50 seconds it is really good fun and very relaxing. You can do it anywhere in Europe, mostly I go to a place near Barcelona in Spain.” And they said they liked the food (especially the chicken) better here in Bangalore than at home and we calculated that it is ten times cheaper!

All in all, it was an interesting conversation and I hope St. John finds suitable people to work with here in Bangalore, and wish them all the best

Watch the Linux Can! video (I took yesterday night) now!

I just can’t get that tune out of my head …

Update : The video is now available on Google Video.

Yesterday was such a long and awesome day.

The day started with me missing Taj’s talk on Entropy and I’m still kicking myself for that one. I attended Gora’s talk on IndLinux efforts and I got to know about the various efforts in localization and translations going on.

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Then, Alan Cox spoke on Modern Linux Device Drivers. There was so much information that he was doling out that I didn’t quite follow, but I did get the gist and understood that kernel stuff ain’t that much of a voodoo as I thought it would be. It simply requires a lot more discipline and awareness of how design impacts performance.

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Then, it was Welte’s turn to talk how he reverse-engineered Motorola’s EZX linux phones to allow a full free software stack to be used on the phone. It was interesting to note the various steps he takes, including using an oscilloscope to find out which probes and points actually work! I didn’t stay for the whole talk because the amount of jargon involved was simply beyond me.

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Next, I was listening to Volker on the Munich City’s transition to free software. Interestingly, in the city’s evaluation, they found the proprietary solutions to be cheaper than the free software contract quotes (we are talking a difference of 10 million or more!) but they took many more considerations such as long-term costs, support, localization, etc. and finally OpenOffice+Linux got lot more points and was finally chosen by the Munich city. The last-minute offers by MS which include cuts of 7 million dollars, etc. were not considered by Munich.

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After that, we were in an Advanced Python BoF with Taj, Siddharth, and many others. With Sid being present, the talk veered off in various directions and that’s a good thing. Sid was talking about how to have some feedback values put in generators and Taj gave an example of how such a problem is faced in producer-consumer setup when they are using python generators. Taj said there’s a relevant PEP that’s out there but with no consensus yet on what’s going to be done about it. There was much more discussed including decorators, metaclasses, and Ruby too (no, we didn’t bash it).

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(more…)

Today, the keynote address was by Andrew Cowie on Inside|Outside, and it was a brilliant talk. Cowie is a very animated and fun person. The talk was about how people are on the inside or outside of the community and what it takes to cross over. He gave various examples, including himself on how he had to step in to take care of java-gnome because the original author vanished from the scene. He also explained we need to be pragmatic and show a united front. For example, he was particularly appreciative of Hari Krishnan’s posters and why it shouldn’t matter whether he used a proprietary software such as Corel Draw. Actually, Hari needed some vector drawing ability which was not available in any of the open source tools. The people who bitched about using a non-open source software would better have spent their time fixing the actual problem. Similarly, he slammed the “GNU/” thingy issue raised everytime in a conference and people actually cheered him! I liked the way he stressed “No one can tell you no” … Cowie has put up the talk slides online.

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Then, I attended Till Adam’s talk on Kolab and got to know how a German ministry funded Kolab 1 and subsequently how Kolab 2 has become a real viable alternative to the Exchange/Outlook combination. The technical bits were interesting, like how Kolab just reuses Cyrus-imapd for everything and treats all the information as just imap mails, including memos and calendars, etc. Since Cyrus-imapd is very scalable and kolabd is a lightweight daemon, Till said that many deployments of Kolab had scaled really well.

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Then, I caught the last few minutes of Dr. George Easaw talking about Moodle. He was very enthusiastic about Moodle and is using this course management system in their college.

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The FOSS in Agriculture : OSCAR talk was very interesting. OSCAR stands for Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas and has been sponsored by the French Institute of Pondicherry. OSCAR has a database of plants and images of the different parts of the plant. Once a farmer selects how the plant looks like, the list of species that match it are shown, and the correct species can be selected. In the species page, many details are present such as the names in local languages, whether it is a weed or a plant, whether it is good or bad, etc. They have developed this software in conjunction with teams in the field coordinating with farmers. Apparently, they want the software to reach a certain stage of completion and then open source it, which would likely be around March of next year.

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Then, Sai Sreekanth spoke about FOSS in primary education. He presented his experience with schools in Kuppam and how freely available software made a difference to the learning of the children. Interestingly, he said that training and English were not the barriers – just having a computer running with all the software loaded were enough and the kids really learn to explore on their own. He demonstrated a few software that were very useful and the audience were quite fascinated by the breadth and depth of the software such as Tux Math Scrabble, Celestia, Anagramarama, edu.kde and many more. There is a whole lot of software out there available for school education that need to be taken advantage of, especially in hinterland areas where good teachers are rare and there are budget constraints. For example, if a school can’t afford a real chemistry laboratory, then ChemConnection is an amazing piece of software where you can mix and match chemicals and see the result of the reactions. Sai pointed to many more resources such as iosn.net, ofset.org, pratham.org and Edubuntu.

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Next, I attended Kalyan’s talk on Web Application Security. He made revelations on how insecure sites can be and how easy it could be to circumvent the “128-bit SSL encryption high-security” stuff and do nasty things. All you need is 10 min to look around the HTML code. In fact, he demonstrated how we can easily get DVD players from Rediff Shopping or Indiatimes Shopping by changing the price from say 2999 to just 2 rupees in the HTML code and then clicking submit… Don’t try this at home, kids. His stress was that cryptography gave a false sense of security, it was easy to bypass the security. What is most needed is common sense and strict input validation is one of the best ways to be secure.

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Then, I attended the Foss in Education : A Panel Discussion. Yes, it’s a recurring theme in the discussions I attended today. Many points were discussed but Atul came in and set the discussion straight explaining the difference of FOSS in education and FOSS as education and why we need to differentiate between the two. The former is using FOSS as tools for education whereas the latter means FOSS becomes syllabus. Obviously, I think the former is a better idea. There were professors and students participating in the discussion actively. Gopi Garge was chaperoning the discussion and summarizing the points regularly.

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Unfortunately, attending these sessions meant missing Kaustubh’s podcasting talk and Mrinal’s FOSS Studio talk as well.

Finally, I last attended the KDE Development Workshop by Taj and Till.

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Outside, people had gathered in groups and were all discussing away. You could just feel the ideas and discussions and opinions whooshing by.

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Update : Philip has put up his notes on why foss in education makes sense.

Today morning, the first session was a Linux Kernel roadmap by Jonathan Corbet. Although I’ve never been a kernel-level guy, the talk was interesting and he clearly explained how features have been added and improved over the various versions, and how the development process has improved and become more “professional.”

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Then, it was my turn to talk and I talked about TurboGears. The talk went pretty good and it was well-attended which made me quite happy even though I had some tough competition, heh.

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I did make two mistakes. First was that I got worried about the time I had to finish the talk, and second, I concentrated too much on the slides. Whenever I have presented well (which has been most of the time, thankfully), I tend to leave slides as guidance for the audience, and have my thoughts free-flowing enough to be coherent and entertaining. Well, I don’t think I’ll be making these mistakes again. However, I did get good feedback about the talk from various people, and a good number of questions after the talk, which is always a good sign. For those who couldn’t attend, my TurboGears slides are online.

And one more thing … my book’s website byteofpython.info is now running on TurboGears! This is only the second public website ever running TurboGears after diggdot.us.

Then, I attended Gopal_V‘s talk on programming in the Mozilla platform. He gave a very detailed approach to creating Mozilla applications and how to go about things. I must get the slides from him later, but it shouldn’t be a problem grabbing hold of him since he works in the same floor as me at Y! His slides are online.

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I was on my way to the OpenLaszlo talk, but took a peak in the Ruby on Rails tutorial. Does Ruby on Rails really need the CREATE TABLE SQL statements to be written by hand? …. I think I prefer the SQLObject approach of having all the database-schema in one place as simple Python classes instead of having separate database creation and database manipulation (ActiveRecord) parts.. Update: The new RoR migrations feature is simply brilliant. Thanks to Mark Ramm for the tip.

Other than that, Rails looked cool. The directory structure created by rails as well as the test-driven nature was good.

Then, I got into the OpenLaszlo talk by Nirav Mehta. I had seen the OpenLaszlo demos before and used to follow Oliver Steele’s blog, but I never got around to writing anything with it. Nirav kept the audience engaged and showed off some eye candy stuff that OpenLaszlo provides from images to animation. Somebody in the audience asked him to put audio as well, but unfortunately, he didn’t have any mp3s.

Then, my friends and myself headed to the food court and then went around the FOSS Expo section. The Sun Microsystems booth was the best one and they showcased real open source projects such as Belenix (the OpenSolaris LiveCD) and NetBeans. I got a demo of OpenSolaris’ DTrace functionality and it was pretty impressive.

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Sadly, the other stalls like the Google and Yahoo! booths didn’t showcase any open source projects at all! When Google has open sourced many projects and Yahoo! has contributed open source stuff such as the Alternative PHP Cache, why can’t they show it off and demonstrate they too are part of the community (and invite people to join the company), which I thought was the point behind the stalls…

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Then, I saw Pramode in the Phoenix stall and it seems people are showing interest in Phoenix which was good to hear. Nearby, Anush and Tejas were in the Python stall and trying to entice people to talk about Python, heh.

Soon, we were back in the Intel hall for Jaya Kumar’s talk on GPL and non-GPL code interaction in the Linux kernel. He stressed that binary-only kernel driver modules are not a good idea and his explanation was pretty simple – it screws users on other architectures and users using different distro-compiler-etc. combinations. Another point is that they are not respecting the people who wrote the Linux kernel. He quoted Linus Torvalds saying it has to be a two-way street, if somebody wants to write something using the Linux kernel, they have to contribute back as well. Jaya Kumar was over-shooting his time slot but he had a lot of interesting examples and incidents to talk about. I think he had more than 100 (sic) slides in his presentation. Outside the hall, Jaya Kumar and Harald Welte were mobbed and they had a good time interacting with others.

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Then, I attended the “FOSS in Education” BoF. Philip, Manish and Praveen were also there. The discussion involved quite a number of issues and Praveen has added a nice page in the FCI wiki regarding the discussion. The focus was mainly in creating awareness, and getting students interested, at the high school level. The emphasis shouldn’t be in simply using open source but stressing the points on why open source is good for everybody, and how the community is the core strength.

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Phew. As you can gather, it was a long day but an exciting, educative and interesting one.

I was looking at planet.foss.in and hoping to look for any insights from the many talks that I missed today (there are 6 tracks running in parallel!), but it seems very few people write such long posts as dumb me!

Today’s the first day of foss.in/2005 and I actually managed to wake up early.

When I reached the venue, I saw a looooong queue of people waiting to get into the place. It seems there was a power outage and because of that, they couldn’t do the registrations. But one of the privileges of being a speaker is that you get to bypass these queues and directly walk in, heh.

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It was a delight meeting Taj again, and I was standing next to Alan Cox although I didn’t speak to him because I had no idea what to say. He has this persona around him similar to Stallman. Maybe it’s because of his long beard. It was good to meet Andrew Cowie and Dr. Tarique saab too.

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The talks started one hour late, and first off, Atul kicked off the inauguration by explaining why foss.in is different from other conferences. Some of the points I remember is:

• Talks are the side-show. Discussions, interactions, exchange of ideas, etc. is the real agenda.
• There are FOSS villages, etc. where people can go and start talking, discussing, etc.
• If 1000 people attend, and 10 people are convinced and jump in to open source and actually contribute, it’s a success. If it’s 50 people, it’s a mind-boggling success.
• We have no chief guests. The audience is the chief guest. So we have representatives from various Linux Users’ Group to do the Indian tradition of lighting the lamp to inaugurate the start of the conference.
• The motto of the conference is the poem ["Where The Mind

Update : First, WP was cutting off comments, and now it's cutting off posts too!? Anyway, I'm adding some of the points of the first day I still remember but it's been 3 days already... :

• The motto of the conference is the poem "Where The Mind Is Without Fear" by Rabindranath Tagore. I love the last line - Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
• Every line of that poem has some significance for the FOSS community.

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The first keynote speech was “Use the source, luke” by Alan Cox. Surprisingly, for a hardcore technical person like Alan Cox, he spoke very well and catered to a non-technical audience as well. He illustrated many points very well, such as learning by doing as the only practical way and stressing that reusing code should be done and is strongly encouraged. Also, he explained how bug reporting is a simple aspect of getting non-programmers involved in the community as well.

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Danese Cooper’s talk on FOSS : Opportunities for India was very good. She stressed on various things, including teaching your daughters to code.

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Due to the delays in the morning, the talks were running in different orders in different halls, and I missed Rasmus’ talk on XSS in the confusion.

Then, I attended Pradeep’s talk on educational content sites using Plone.

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Gopal’s talk on DotGNU was interesting, and he explained how he became the de-facto guy because of which DotGNU was moving forward since the main developer was no longer interested and turned his attention to building model ships. Though, I had heard this talk before when we were in Kerala last month.

Next, we attended Cowie’s talk on equivalence which is a nice word play. Equivalence is useful to build java-gnome and getting it running. He explained why the current tools suck and why he needed something to simplify the entire process.

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Finally, I caught the latter part of Atul’s talk on Impact of FOSS on Everything.

Continuing the nostalgia, here are pictures of the LinCDs.com shirts that Yashwanth (it was his idea) and myself wore at LB/2003.

The LinCDs.com name is a bit worn off now. Those numbers you see below the name is the version numbers that we had at that time. 9.0 was Red Hat, 9.2 was Mandrake, 3.0r1 was Debian, ….

Oh, and that shirt still fits me.

I was invited back to Thrissur to present a talk to engineering students. Since I didn’t want to give the same ol’ introductory Python talk at the same place, I decided to talk about TurboGears, since that’s been pretty much the only new thing I’ve had time to explore off late.

I left in a train on Thursday afternoon, reached Thrissur on Friday morning, left again on Friday evening, and back in Bangalore on Saturday morning, and I had so much fun in-between all that.

I have a lot to write about this event and the various talks and demonstrations that were happening. However, Pramode has such a good writeup about Insignia ’05 that I didn’t feel the need to write about it myself.

Also, I don’t have any pictures from this event since I forgot my digicam when I was hurriedly packing to reach the railway station on time.

Note: I will be speaking on TurboGears at foss.in/2005.

Preparations for this year’s FLOSS meet in Bangalore is well under way. The working title is still LB2005 (Linux/Bangalore 2005) but the name will be changed to something more suitable. As Chitnis mentions, the idea is to promote FLOSS in general, including FLOSS on Windows and proprietary software on Linux.

If you want to find out what’s happening or want to voice your opinion on how things should happen, please join the mailing list.

Travel

I travelled to Trichur (also called Thrissur) in Kerala on Friday to attend Renaissance 2005, a FOSS festival at GEC, Trichur, Kerala, India. The festival was conducted by the MCA students of GECT. It was a 3-day event but I attended only the 2nd day – I was there to give a talk on Python.

(Tip : Hover the mouse over the photos to get insightful info Also, as usual, click on it to see the bigger version of the photo )

The train arrived in Thrissur at 5 in the morning. Two of the students came to pick me up and took me in the big Tata Safari to the Government Guest House where I was lodged. Apparently, one of the ministers suddenly showed up, so I got bumped from an AC room to a non-AC room. Well, no big deal.

Morning

After a light snooze, I met with Shuveb Hussain of NatureSoft in Chennai. He was going to speak on High Performance Computing. We went down for breakfast together and we instantly hit it off. He was a delightful person. 4 years ago, he graduated from B.A. in Literature where he studied Shakespeare. Today, he was going to speak on clusters and kernel patches. Amazing, eh? It seems Linux and OSS excited him so much that he started to dabble in it a lot and eventually made a career out of it.

It was a government guest house, so most of the stuff, from the pillow to the plate, was branded with the famous "God’s Own Country" slogan After breakfast, we still had some time left before our hosts had to pick us up. So, we went for a stroll and we came across a ‘pen hospital’ . Apparently, its very real and they do ‘heal’ pens. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be shocked. I remember from my last Kerala trip where I saw a building with its name ‘Hilarious Building’. Heh.

After that, we stopped to get a coconut. The coconut water was simply delicious and the white kernel was so thick! Well, after all, Kerala is the land of coconuts. I wish I could get such tasty coconuts in Bangalore. Then, we headed to the campus.

The GECT campus is really huge – over 100 acres! They teach almost every kind of engineering branch and have so many labs. I heard that GECT is one of the best engineering colleges in Kerala, probably next only to the Trivandrum engineering college.

There were some paper presentations going on in the main hall. These students were talking about ext3 file systems and optimization of IPC in the kernel and so on. Yikes.

There was a short break after the paper presentations got over and before the techie talks started. The HOD of the MCA department was sitting next to me and the nice lady was telling about the GECT college and I was curious about the college and stuff. She pointed out that one of the judges was Pramode C E, a well respected personality who teaches students in his own computer learning lab. I had heard a lot about Pramode previously from many students. I don’t think you can find a single CompSci or IT student in Kerala who doesn’t know about Pramode. He has also written many articles for Linux Gazette and Linux For You magazine. I planned to meet him later on.

The next thing I know, Pramode comes over to us and talks to Shuveb and myself. He looks at me and says ‘Hello BangPyper’ and then says ‘I am a big fan of your blog’. I was speechless. We three soon got talking about lots of techie stuff, everything from favorite distros to Python (of course) to our work and so on. I convinced him to join our BangPypers group as well.

Techie Talks

Then, the talk on embedded Linux by Sree Kumar of NeST, Thiruvananthapuram started. He explained how Linux was taking the embedded market by storm and the kind of work his company was involved in. He gave a good overview of embedded Linux and tried to convince the students that a career in embedded Linux is very rewarding as well.

Next up was Shuveb who talked about high performance computing and clusters. It was interesting to hear about openMosix and other software which autodetects other computers in the network which are also running openMosix and automatically start to work as a cluster. No need to edit any sort of config file! He uses a cluster in his office environment and uses it for compiling lots of stuff and apparently, this setup gives a lot of performance.

Python talk

It was 1 pm by now and a lunch break was due. The speakers were taken to a separate room (by the looks of it, a staff meeting room) and we were served lunch there. One of our hosts, Brajesh asked us to eat ‘without formalities’. I said ‘Well, you made it too formal already!’. I also learnt my first word in Malayalam – ‘Vellam’ means ‘water’.

After the sumptuous lunch, I had the formidable task of talking to students in the post-lunch session. I started off with finding out the programming background of the students. Majority knew C and C++. None knew Perl and about 3-4 knew Python (again, taught by Pramode). So, my task was a bit easier since explaining a dynamic language like Python is always exciting to a person from a static language background.

I talked with relative ease (having had quite a bit of practice in recent months and students seemed to be listening. I was worried that they were not asking questions but I ignored that for the moment. I could see the sparkle in the eyes of few students when I typed programs at the interpreter prompt and showed instant results. That’s exactly what I love about giving these talks.

The talk went on for about an hour and I am always surprised to see that Jython and IronPython make a significant eyebrow-raising experience for students. The fact that you can write Python programs and run it on all the three – native (i.e. C), Java and .NET platforms, seems to be a big plus point for everyone.

We finally had the Q&A session and I then faced a barrage of questions. The session lasted a good 15-20 minutes with questions like "Will Python take a chunk of the Java market ?", "What about it’s speed?", "What kind of people use Python a lot?" and so on. I was relieved after this session because the range of questions seemed to indicate that the students did listen to the talk and did become interested in Python.

Campus Tour

I then went out of the main hall and decided to go for a stroll around the college. Two students followed me and volunteered to guide me around the campus. They kept calling me ‘Sir’ inspite of my request not to. (It seemed kinda strange to me for people older than or the same age as me to be calling me ‘Sir’).

As I had said earlier, the college campus is really huge. I would’ve loved to have studied in a college like this – big, full of greenery and lively. I came to know that the foundation stone was laid by Jawaharlal Nehru.

There are so many labs in the college including a ‘Fluid Dynamics lab’ (whatever that is)! They showed me the ‘MCA Tree’ where the MCA students hang out after classes (and even during classes ). Then there was the mini-forest inside the campus where the ‘coolest classroom’ (literally) was located. It seems the girls hostel is next to this side of the campus. No comments on that one.

Phoenix

I then went to the other hall where Pramode was going to give a talk and demo the Phoenix project. I had heard about this before and knew it had something to do with Physics but didn’t know much else about it.

Pramode introduced that PHOENIX stood for ‘Physics with HOme made Equipments and iNnovatIve eXperiments’. Nifty acronym. It was a electronic circuit designed by B. P. Ajith Kumar, a researcher working with the Nuclear Science Centre of India. It is designed as a general-purpose circuit to help students create experiments to understand and learn Physics, Electronics and much much more.

The idea of the Phoenix project is to provide a computer interface to the electronic circuit. This allows the student to write simple programs and manipulate the circuit and then observe the effects. Ajith Kumar has provided an interface in C. Obviously, it is difficult to expect a non-CompSci student to learn C and write programs for this. So, Pramode has written a Python interface to this program and now a student can write simple calls at the interpreter prompt and see results instantly!

He ran this program at the prompt:

[python] p = phoenix() p.write_outputs(’11111111′) [/python]

and then voila, the bulb was lit! This might seem boring to you now but try to think back as a student when you did your first experiments in the laboratory. This would’ve been fascinating to do then. Physics seemed too theoritical for me but projects like these can make a big difference. Pramode even showed how to use the setup as an oscilloscope by running a small TkInter Python program and showing the graph on screen real-time. Changing the wavelength changed the graph instantly!

One of the major plus points of Phoenix is that all the parts used to make the circuit are locally available and it costs just about 2000 rupees. Compare this to an oscilloscope which costs 20,000 rupees. Also, the Phoenix circuit board design, the C API and the Python API are all free for everyone. Anybody can contribute further to the project as well. This is the power of free and open source software and this is an example of innovative projects in India at the same time.

Pramode has written a full article at Linux Gazette about Phoenix.

Evening

After an enlightening session on Phoenix, the fest part of the day was over. I took a few snaps of our wonderful hosts and the girls who took care of the speakers as well as the speakers ourselves.

The guys – Ragesh, Arun, and others (our hosts) offerred to take Shuveb and myself to the Central shopping mall in Thrissur. This part of the city looked like MG Road and Brigade Road to me. Lot of hustle-bustle and commercial shops here. The Central shopping mall looked like the kind of place where all the cool kids hang out. We had dinner in one of the hotels in the mall and the 5 of us enjoyed talking about lots of stuff and joking around.

Then, it was finally time for me to catch the bus back to Bangalore. My only regret was that I couldn’t stay back another day. Ragesh told me about a good trekking place just 2 km from Thrissur. Damn, I missed that! The guys have already invited me for Renaissance 2006 in advance

To summarize, a lot can happen in a day!

Also, the complete set of full-size photos is in my Renaissance 2005 photoset.