LB2004 Day 3

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…