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Fourth day at Foss.in. Second of Main Conference.

It Was a BoF day. Lots and lots of technical and ethical meetings are happened there in the BoF tents. But I was not ready to miss the two morning sessions. First one by Simon Phillips from sun microsystems topic titled “The Virtuous Cycle: Sun’s Philosophy and Strategy”. He pointed out the business tactics of Sun in Open Source Projects and how Sun makes money by utilizing the opensource philosophy.

Another lightning talk of the day, by Danese Cooper titled “Trucking with White Elephants – Corporate Employment in Open Source”. She is Advocate for FOSS now working in Intel Corp.

The main program in the afternoon was the Indlinux PowerBoF. Brain storming discussions towards making computers speak Indic languages. The moderator was Gora Mohanty. SMC done it’s part very well with participation as well as contribution.

In the evening we just wandered around through some streets of banglore city. Came home late after having dinner from a “Thattukada” near IISc campus.

Third day at Foss.in.

The project days came to end. Here starts the Main conference. The inauguration was at 10AM. As it became a habit to come late, we missed the inaugural ceremony, but we managed to get in before the inaugural session by Naba Kumar on topic titled “Anjuta DevStudio” , a C++ IDE created by him (Anjuta is name of his wife).

Another sessions I attended were,

1. “Lguest: Implementing the little Linux hypervisor” by the great Linux kernel hacker Rusty Russel, Lguest provides a full paravirtualization mechanism for Linux.

2. “Plan 9 from Bell labes” by Anant Narayanan, A student of Malaviya NIT. He covered the highlights of the distributed operating system from bell labs named Plan9 which is different from familiar Linux/Unix and windows environment. More than any thing it was a call for contribution. The first statement he mentioned to begin the call is “Be prepared to Unlearn what you have learned so far”

3. “Contributing to Zope Project” by Baiju M, who started SMC project. Zope is an application server based on python for building content management systems. It was a call for contribution.

4. “How and why you should become a kernel hacker” by James Morris a well known kernel hacker. One of his interesting statements was, “There is a myth that kernel hackers are mutant super geniuses. Yes there are very few, but most are just good engineers”. He pointed the ways to become a good kernel hacker. Yes it was exceptionally interesting.

In the evening Hiran went to his sister’s home. In that night I felt more space in the bed as because the big person was not there in between me and Suresh .

Second day in Foss.in, another project day.

My schedule for the particular day was Indlinux and Fedora. The other two project days happened in the same day was Open Office and KDE.

The first session on indlinux was by G. Karunagar. The topic was “Indlinux introduction”. He covered the Indic l10n status and indic tools like Spell checker, TTS(Text to Speech) and STT(Speech to Text). He ended up with a call for Indlinux BoF(Birds of Feather).

After Karunagar’s session I moved to Fedora hall where it was time to start session by Mairin Duffy(Interaction Designer at RedHat Inc.) on “How to Theme Fedora”. She described all possible ways through we can hack the fedora theme to make it more eye candy, beginning from the install time graphics.

The evening sessions were completely dedicated to SMC. First session was a workshop by Santhosh Thottingal(SE in Infosys, Contributor to SMC, Creator of Swanalekha, Dhwani and Malayalam spell checker) titled “Dhwani – Indian Language Text to speech system”. It was a rocking session the hall was filled completely and Santhosh presented it well. Lots of funny comments(south Indian reading Gujarati, north Indian reading Malayalam ) made the session more alive.

Then it was Syam’s turn, another SMC contributor and a GSoC candidate. He came up with a workshop titled “A crash course on automatic speech recognition”. In first few minutes he was little scared due to technical problems with his laptop and LCD projector. After that he got the rhythm and ended up with great appreciation.

In that evening we shifted to Anivar’s home. There ended the problem for living space permanently. Anivar was staying there in his newly rented house as a part of centralizing his works in Banglore. It was in the first floor of a flat. It was a pretty looking home with a hall, 2 bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom. Hiran, Suresh and me conquered in the second bedroom. It was a horrible experience for me and Suresh to sleep in the same bed with a little ‘payyans’ of just 19 years and have a too big body .