Day 2 - FOSS.IN

Wednesday, December 2nd 2009,
NIMHANS Convention Centre,
Bangalore, India

This time I woke up early enough to catch the bus! :o)

The bus discussion was mostly taken up by Ramkumar's rant of how crappy Pulse Audio was and the idea of rewiting it, and Rahul Sundaram arguing how we sometimes need to shut our eyes and deal with crappy code. A classic argument between Usability and Good Code followed. The discussion continued until we reached the venue and it was time to start the Fedora Project of the Day.

We were assigned Auditorium 3. We started with Jeorg Simon's talk on the Security spin. Though I did not understand most of the technical details, I found that Jeorg was a good speaker. Though he frequently ranted about his English, I found that it was pretty OK and the German guy did a pretty good job.

[The Fedora Project of the Day mainly comprised of talks, and introductions to workouts. As the FOSS.IN workouts were flexible, it made sense for the speakers to use the auditorium to give the attendees a idea about the Workouts which then could be hacked for the next three days.]

Rahul Sundaram followed next with his Workout on "How to integrate a Free and Open Source software into Fedora". He demonstrated a live package build on the stage. The internet was a little slow and so was the Fedora Project wiki due to some maintenance issues, and Rahul kept up his constant rant.

It was followed by lunch. After lunch I got a multi-colored LED stuck to my collar, just like Kushal and a lot others had on their FOSS.IN Cards. We also spent a lot of time talking with the Greek (Dimitris Glezos) and the Germans (Joerg Simon) about Indian Cusine and how it differed from their food.

We wend back into the auditorium where Kedar Sovani was giving his talk on "Fedora ARM". I wasn't very interested in that so I spend most of the time updating my slides and getting nervous about my upcoming workshop.

Kushal Das took the stage next Combining his "Deadly Combo" talk with his b00g workout. I was then busy building a repo for my Dorrie workout. Soon it was Rahul Sundaram on the stage trying to build a Fedora Remix 'Live in Concert'. The talk about the Kickstart and everything was really nice, except that it stuck infinitely at the place where he was actually supposed the build the Live CD.

I went next. It was my first Talk in a Conference of this stature. I was nervous and fumbled a lot of times. But then I gained confidence and I demo'd my stuff live. It did not break (It never does, but knowing Murphy...) *I thought Glezos wasn't paying attention*. People were mainly concerned when was Dorrie going to be deployed, Susmit and Himanshu helped me out here saying it was a Fedora Infrastructure decision and I added that it still needed 3-4 months to gain enough maturity.

Susmit followed next with his Workout introduction to "Redefining the Fedora Distribution Process". I Liked the idea of using GeoIP to point a person looking for Fedora Media of a place closer to his home, instead of him going through the entire list. I suggested we could ask the user his/her location on a World Map, as GeoIP is not always reliable. I don't thing Susmit liked the idea, but anyway.

With this we wrapped up the Fedora Project of the Day with the promise of workouts later today and tomorrow onwards. I spend some time idling away, building a Fedora repo on my External Hard Drive, reading Tweeviews (Tweet reviews) on Herald Welte's talk and eve's dropping on the two BoFs going on around me. Kinda felt pleasant and sleepy. Sayamindu hacking on something beside me looked tired too.

An hour and a lot of shouting/screaming Kushals later we found ourselves having a nice dinner and beer at a place close to our Hotel called "Gufha". We billed 18,000 INR. Damn you Kushal!

[*I thought Glozos wasn't paying attention* to my talk on Dorrie but then he spent some time with me after dinner discussing web frameworks and why he liked Django and liked that I used Django for developing Dorrie.]

Somewhat tired/drunk/sleepy now. I guess no late night BoF in the hotel room today. Rahul Sundaram snoring away as usual.

Ok. Good Night!