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First Day at FOSS.in.

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.

We reached banglore at 7.00 am 2 hours after the scheduled time. Our plan was to get down at Majestic station, but we changed our plan as per the last minute discussions with Santhosh and Anivar and we stepped out at Banglore Cantonment.

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.