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

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…

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

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.

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 .

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 .

The two things i really felt missing was one letter pad and a program schedule.
Hey, Just leave it, they may forgotten that…

We five(Hiran, Syam, Suresh, Sathosh and me)reached the JN Tata Auditorium(National Science Symposium Center) at 11 am. Before the registration we went for our breakfast at the coffee board canteen inside the IISc campus. From there Anivar joined us. After that we registered for the event and we got the delegate pass and kit.

There were 4 project days happening in the first day. Debian/Ubuntu, Gnome, Open Solaris and Firefox. At the time we reached inside after registration it was time for a talk by Cristian Perrier on Internationalization of Debian project, the one talk i planned to attend earlier. It was a nice one and very much informative for me as i work with the Debian malayalam localization team(Swathanthra Malayalam Computing).

The second talk i attended was by Sreayas Sreenivasan on “Clutter with OpenGL interfaces”. After that Andrew Cowie from operational dynamics presented a paper on “Challenges and opportunities of properly writing multi threaded gtk based programs”. That also was an interesting talk. I was the first time attending a talk based on java-gnome.

The another two talks that I attended were “Dealing with indic issues in debian/ubuntu” by Kartik Mistry(Localized gujarati geek) and “Giving back to the community” by Sam Hocevar(Debian Project Leader 2007-2008).

In the evening we didn’t get the proposed rooms because of some miscommunication between us and Mobin(GECT). At last Hiran and Suresh managed to get some space in youth hostel banglore. And we enjoyed that one night in a 16 bed Dormitory.

Santhosh and Syam had accommodation arranged in a hotel by the organizers as they are the speakers for the program. Hiran Suresh and myself went with syam with a plan in mind that we can find some space by evening.

Now on the way to Banglore. Just began our journey from Thrissur in Banglore special train. We were three as decided early. Hiran(an exceptional gnu maniac), Shyam(Creator of Sarika, the speech recognition system and also a speaker too) and myself. We really felt the absence of Pramode sir as he canceled the program due to some personal reason. In the last moment we got another friend to join us, Suresh(who put “Suruma” in the eyes of pango ). Some friends from GECT were also there in the same train but in another compartment.

From the beginning of the journey itself we started our usual discussions(Kathiyadi). Suresh also joined us even though he was in another compartment. We continued our discussions till our co-passengers asked Hiran to keep down his “smooth” voice.

We went to bed by 11, and it was a night without any food!! Hiran blogged about that here.