foss.in day 2
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.”
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.
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.
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 . Update: The new RoR migrations feature is simply brilliant. Thanks to Mark Ramm for the tip.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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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!
foss.in day 1
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.
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.
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.
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.
Danese Cooper’s talk on FOSS : Opportunities for India was very good. She stressed on various things, including teaching your daughters to code.
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.
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.
Finally, I caught the latter part of Atul’s talk on Impact of FOSS on Everything.
Thrissur again
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.
