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FOSS.NITC / Awaking
minds FOSS.NITC..yet another get togetherness of young free software enthusiasts ( i would like to see in that way ). As a participant ( " delegate " for the organizers! ), i would like to share the two days of experience. Day 1 Getting a little bit of early morning at home happened to be a little bit lazy for me. Since i could get maximum two days to spend at home, i usually try to sleep at late night. Most of the nights will be spending before my PC, reading, googling, experimenting etc. So i usually could wake up late morning..not too bad... around 8:30 AM. Thats all. That day, i managed to catch a bus at 7:30 from Calicut University. Ragesh will be waiting for me there at NIT gate..i promised him to reach there around 8:45. At last, around 9:00, i joined him and we two people marched towards the seminar hall. A little bit of confusion at the registration counter.. We registered our reg. no. which we collected after registering online yesterday evening. Collecting the materials, we were the first two ' delegates ' entered the seminar hall. A quite nice hall. A well maintained hall. I discussed a lot about the NITC's infrastructure and facilities with Ragesh. We dreamed ( which could be the only comfortable that we can do ) such a facility in our college also through which we could made Renaissance more and more beautiful. After 30 minutes, the inaugural began. A few chief guests including the Director of NITC spoke few things. The brain behind the events, few students from Computer Science department ( i also met one from ECE! ), most of them are from outer states, used their opportunity. Everything went fine for the inaugural session. But except..the keynote address. One of their alumni, now working at TCS ( leading M$ team!!! ), was invited for the keynote address. But i couldn't get him...his points were really confusing...i didn't realized what he tried to convince the audience where everyone would expect something related to the theme of the event especially from a key note speaker. After a cup of tea..with vada and laddu ( 'Food sessions' were really wonderful for two days :-P ), the morning session began. The first presenter was Pradeepto Bhatacharya from En-Interactive ltd. His topic was KDE/QT. Everybody expected a depth session in programming with Qt. But he covered only the basics of Qt programming. Also introduced some KDE tools lively like everyone's favorite Amarok. NITC campus is really a WiFi campus. Most of the speakers used the internet from their notebooks during their presentation. Really a nice thing. Pradeepto introduced the striking and exclusive features of Amarok which most users are not aware of. He downloaded a few cover albums for Aerosmith together palying the song through amarok. During the session, familiar visitor to every FOSS programmes, Sarath Laxman with his father joined us. After that interesting session, Gopal V from Yahoo! started GNUing with his s word .GNU. He may have noticed us ( me and Ragesh ), ' the same two guys ' from Insignia. We are second time experiencing his speech on the same subject. Then came the Gentoo talk by Shyam Mani. Pramode sir mentioned at his blog on last FOSS.IN about the extraordinary discussion happened on Gentoo distro. This man was really behind that. I came to know that he was the man who administrated the technical setup for the event by preparing the systems by loading Gentoo on all of them. I think no one will be interested in trying that distro since we need to do a lot for a try. I usually tests every distribution which come in my hands. But i talked with a few audience after the session. But no one them have an interest to do that. I also not hoping to try it in near future. After the 'heavy' lunch where Ragesh and Baiju ( he is a well known contributor to FOSS, especially in Kerala by handling earlier work of localization project.. now he works as a core developer of a firm nearby NITC ), we moved together to the hall. We have a plan to attend both the Live CD workshop by Sarath and Debian workshop conducted by coordinators of FOSS 2005, Dileep and Praveen. But we couldn't get the limited seats. Afternoon session began with Philip Tellis. He introduced Creative Common license. His presentation was without any slides..He is an idealistic person. He first attracted the audience by playing a cute video which was releases under the same license. He described the simple and most creative licensing scheme referring the license home page. After his presentation, the organizers were managed to fill the huge time gap between the last and the next session by conduction a BOF ( Bird of Feathers ) session. An idea taken from FOSS.IN. Time to go. For me. After BOF, I and Ragesh left the place to catch the bus way back to home though there was one more presentation left for the day. That was Game programming by Shree Kumar. But we were helpless since the time was around 5:30. But from the response from Baiju, that session wasn't great at all. That guy was playing with the source code of Quake3...the funny thing was..we could use the source code.. but we are not allowed to buid the game from that.. its like ' open source without freedom '.. I think through this way most companies are going to market their own foolishness. Day 2 My arrival at NITC campus was too early for me.. also for the organizers... That day, Ragesh promised that he wont come since he was engaged with some other important matters. But Baiju was there. And i also able to catch up Arun M from FSF from morning. Vimal was also with him. For the first time we met. The morning session was lately began with Ruby Talk by Premshree Pillai. Including Premshree, some of the speakers were using MAC OS for their presentation. I was really disappointed by seeing that. Although they managed to load the mac ports of the free tools, they were reluctant to leave the MAC OS platform. Is that difficult to get the PPC version of the popular linux distros where there are some specially prepared MAC only distros ( like Yellow Dog Linux ). Poor. At least organizers had to take care of such avoidable issues. Prem Shree was primarily concerned about the duration of the talk. He winded up his presentation quickly. I couldn't follow that in any sense. Next was a security talk by Kalyan Verma from Secuprise. Look like a young boy. That guy really revealed the security holes of major shopping sites through a live demonstration. He really cracked a banking site by doing some silly things which could be solved out by any one with some ' commonsense '. Everyone really enjoyed that session. After that we joined the VLSI/EDA design tools session by Aanjhan R from Robert Bosch. He introduced some free designing tools in electronic world. He also tried to convey the electronics students about the importance of combining ' Electronics with Linux '. Pramode sir, you will be happy to hear that. I have a few words with him after lunch, and really aware him about the work that is happening around GEC Thrissur. He is well aware about Phoenix machine. But he was very happy to know about the python interface for Phoenix. I also invited him to my college. Yes.. he is ready in any weekends. I promised him that i will be contacting him through e-mail. Pramode sir, what you have to say about that? During the session, one more talk is going on other hall.. i think on Fedora ... i couldn't attend it because it is impossible for anyone to attend two talks at the same time. He also handled an session about Embedded Linux. Only an introduction to embedded linux world. Next was a few matters about freedom by Arun M. I never want to miss any talk related to the politics of software freedom. The session focused on matters like... fight for water... for financial freedom.. and finally the core ' Software Freedom '. For the second time i got a chance to listen to his talk. After his presentation, the final session of NITC.FOSS began ( Tea was taken in between ). FOSS Foundry by Shreyas Srinivasan from Novell. He is also a yet another Mac guy. He is doing some Mac ports for Evolution mail client. His talk was really ' out of syllabus '. What he was doing. No order. Sometimes he says something. After that few others. In any way, that was a little bit funny presentation. But he rocked by introducing a great project by Novel named XGL. Fantastic. I am not going to give more details about that. Lets wait and see. Thats a surprise for all Free Software well wishers. Overall, the two day effort from all of them was really wonderful. They managed to get the audience towards FOSS through fun..guidance..and thoughts. The specialty that i noticed through entire event was that it was realized in an informal way. No barriers. No hesitation. But only uniqueness... uniqueness of young free minds for a better world. I am eagerly waiting for the next opportunity. What will be next?. Why we can't think about a joint venture?. Renaissance+Insignia+NITC.FOSS ? Keep on discussing. - Tinku Sampath |
