ap’s websphere

My first Free Software event of the year was “Insignia 3.0 – Hackerdom” held at Govt. Engineering Collage, Thrissur. It was a pretty good experience with fistful of nice hacking sessions.

DAY 1

The keynote speech was given by Krishnakant Mane (Friends call him KK), who is a physically challenged hacker. He is blind by birth but he use computer as a normal person and contributes to various free software projects with the help of screen reading software “Orca”.

Keynote Speech by Krishnakant Mane

Sujith Haridasan came up with another hacking workshop with CHDK ( Canon Hacking Development Kit). Which is a firmware run in Canon cameras to extend the functionality. He showed sone tricks like printing “hello world” on camera screen and blinking the LEDs etc…

Sujith Hands on CHDK

After that Arun from SPACE and KK moderated a Open Discussion on Insight – The project which helps blind people to use computer. He also demonstrated how he uses computer for hacking with the help orca.

Arun and KK – Open Discussion on Insight

DAY 2

On Day 2 I was a little late due to some reasons, and when I reached the venue, Juan’s session was half on the way.

Another interesting personality was Juan Carlos Gentile who took a fabulous session on “Free Music”. He has been using Free Software for many years for video and audio processing

Juan on “Free Music”

I have attended a workshop session on “Blender” the Free 3D modeling tool using which “Elephant’s Dream and “Big Buck Bunny” was created. The session was taken by Sadik

Sadeek – The Blender Geek

DAY 3

The Sessions I could attend on the last day were “Entrepreneurship and Freedom” by Anoop John and “Hacker Culture” by Anivar Aravind

AJ on the way

In general the event was a good one, Informative and most important factor I noticed was that, Media is now understanding the word “Hacker” correctly which is extremely a happy news because it became a routine of media to use the word hacker in place of cracker.

Congratulations to the Hackerdom Team and Happy Hacking

PS:- All the photos posted here are taken in Sujith’s CHDK camera by either Sujith or Me . More photos are available here

Yes, It is true.

I saw more than hundred famous faces, but i can’t remember that much for a long time!!! I can’t share my experiences more effectively with you. Because I didn’t have a Camera.

I heard lots and lots of new terms, ethics, experiences, technologies… But I can’t share all with you as it is. I was not able to prepare notes on the go. Because, I didn’t have a Laptop.

Sorry About that…

Final Day of Foss.in. Here ends the celebrations.

However the main target of the day was BoFs, I made myself available for the session by Andrew Cowie, “User to Hacker in 90 Minutes: The tools and techniques needed to actually contribute to Open Source”. Another excellent session that I enjoyed very much.

Sam Hocevar The Debian Project Leader described almost every ethical stuff of the Debian project and it’s Derivatives(Knoppix, Ubuntu etc) in his session titled “The Debian Project” in the afternoon.

The main attraction of the day was a guy named Tom Callaway who brought one OLPC(One Laptop Per Child) laptop to the venue. He introduced that laptop to everyone in the Fedora stall as his lunch box. It was funny to see the folks trying to open it. See Santhosh’s post to know more about OLPC laptop. Watch a funny shot here How to open an OLPC laptop.

BoFs, “Arts in FOSS” and “FOSS in Education”.

“FOSS in Education” started with an introduction to OLPC laptops by Tom. He described it’s working and it’s significance in primary education. The discussion was moderated by Anivar and Hiran and chaired by prof Nagarguna(President, FSF India).

The final session was a special one by Rusty Russel titled “Rusty and Friends” but it disappointed me a little because it hijacked the time of one of our scheduled BoF “Community == Developers?”.

Closing ceremony by team Foss.in