LINDEC 2004

Spetember 25th, 2004 was the day we had the first ever Linux Desktop Conference in India.

We had a massive work schedule listed down for this, as this was the first thing of this large scale that our team was getting involved into. I was assigned the job of looking over the overall proceedings of preparing for the event. Parag and Nicel were also part of the supervising team. It was good to actually take care of where things were moving on, and pushing things when they were stuck. I was also looking after having a stall for Evolution at the event, where people could have a hands-on experience of Evolution. The main idea was to educate the student community about the various ways in which they could start contributing to Evolution in the open source way. We did a lot of publicity about GNOME bounties . The money aspect of these bounties attracted many people. The idea of this venture was mainly to make people aware of how easy it is to get involved into hacking code in the open source world.

This event was organized at PESIT college, Bangalore. More than 1000 people had registered for this event. It was good to see close to 500 people actually attending the conference. The main feature of this conference was definately Nat Friedman. He gave a very inspiring talk [ this was the feedback i recieved from the students whom i talked ] on how a person starts hacking. He gave his own examples, about how he started with a printf statement and then went on to create terminals with transparent background and further on to make a typo error correction tool. He made people aware of the shyness factor that is associated with all, and how one could overcome it, especially when one is involved in chatting in a channel on xchat or while mailing posts to a mailing list. This talk actually inspired the students to take part into NOSIP. Students had a chance to actually play around with the things at the stalls, that would be later on involved with in NOSIP.

I was also involved with the compering for this event. Shreyas and myself were looking after how the PESIT students were getting on with the compering. Arun, Pratibha, Nagma and Divya [ or was it Vidya ?? ] were selected for this. These people were showing great progress while preparing. They had a very tough time with the material not being available for them. But, it is the final performance that matters, and these people did a great job !!! There was hardly any hiccup and everything went on nice and smooth.

I also created a presentation that would run continously on the main screen while there was no event in progress. This was some nice playing around with OpenOffice. I put up information about all the talks that were scheduled that day andafter some twidling found a way to actually make this presentation run continuously. We had been to PESIT the night before the D-day to setup all our demo material and i was shocked to see the characters in my ppt, all broken !!! Luckily, there were some OpenOffice hackers and they said this was a known bug in the latest development version and that there was already a patch available for it. But how would that help me !!! I didnt have time to build OpenOffice .. no way !! Fortunately, Thanika had an older working version of OpenOffice on his laptop and we used his laptop to display the ppt. There still were some hiccups on the D-day with this ppt, but we managed to fix them just before the event started.

One talk that i attended was the talk on cross platform porting my Jaimon Jose.The slides for this talk are available online here. The main high light of this talk was its simplicity. The guidelines given at the last slides are very informative.

Home Sweet Home

Just back from a wonderful trip to Hubli, my home town.

Its always such a pleasure to be home, especially after a long period of three months [ yeah, i usually visit my home once in 2 months ;-) ] . This time, since i did all my last minute preparations, i had to book my ticket in a VRL-Volvo bus for Rs.325 !!!, instead of my usual train. Yeah, it was a very comfortable bus, with a/c in it ... but it definately lacked the comfort of a train. To top it all, we had one person snoring in full force right behind our seat. One surprise, was that Nagaraj was also in the same bus, so there was some good company. Nagaraj is now a married man, so its quite natural for him to visit Hubli quite often, as his better half is trying real hard to concentrate on her studies and complete her final year.

My parents had no clue that i would be coming home this weekend, and were delighted and surprised to see me there. The first change that i saw in my home was that the fencing was all cut and new braches were sprouting. And yeah, there were some more new flowers in our garden [ I have taken a few snaps of them. Shall update them sometime soon ]. I was dead tired with a neck pain, and slept the first half of Friday. Afternoon, watched "Kabhi Haan, Kabhi Naa" on cable and slept again. Went out in the evening and brought some snacks for a change, and we had a nice time eating those heavy dose cakes.

Saturday, my sister got her certificate for completing her diploma course in Aptech. She secured 78.5 %, which is a great achievement, and she has been consistently scoring above 75% all through the tests in the past year. Its a very good performance. There was some problem with the name mentioned in the certificate, but keeping in mind the past experiences of fiddling with the names at Aptech, we opted not to go ahead with the correction this time. In the evening, i had a nice chat with my dad after his office. Government offices have very rigid hierarchies, and people behave like rulers, or rather dictators i should say. Its not so flexible as in a private firm. I hope my dad gets his transfer soon, for which he is very much eligible and is pending since many months.

Apart from sleeping all day long at home and starting to get irritated about "Yeh tara, woh tara", from Swades, i enjoyed some nice baddy with my sis. She has really improved a lot in baddy, and is playing great these days. I spent some time watching the ICC trophy matches. My disregard for Flintoff has now turned into an admiration, especially after seeing how well he played against Sri Lanka. He has matured a lot, and is now planning his innings quite well. He doesnt go in for any childish slog shots, but is playing some real good cricketing shots. Every team now seems to be having a very good all rounder in their teams, and Flintoff is now the backbone of England's batting. Hope India finds some good all rounder quite soon.

Super Saturday

Its been a day full of great sports events. I am glad to have watched them [ on TV ] . First there was the US Open 2004, Women's Semifinal match between Jennifer Capriati and Elena Dementieva. It was one hell of a fight back match. Dementieva made a mockery of Capriati by beating here 6-0 in the first set in just about 15 minutes, and Capriati had to wait till the eighth game to win her first game of the match. But then, she fought back well and won the second set 6-2. The second set lasted for about 25 minutes. The third set was when the match started picking up pace. Every game was going to the wire and the first 8 games in the third set went to deuce. Both the players got breakpoints in all the 8 games. Dementieva was struggling with her serve. There was hardly any pace in her serves. They barely touched 60mph, and it was more of a spinning serve than a fast paced serve. It was very funny to see her serve that way. Capriati actually didnt take much advantage of her opponents weak serve. The main attraction of the match, apart from the straight nosed Russian, were the long hard hitting rallies from both the players. Dementieva's cross court baseline shots were just amazing. It was but, very heartening to see Dementieva struggle and limp sometimes on the court [ she had a bandaged left thigh ]. The match went into a tie breaker, and Dementieva got some crucial points and finally beat Capriati in this 2 hours 15 minutes match. The final set actually lasted for more than one and half hour !!!

The next sport event of the day was India playing against Kenya, in the ICC Champions Trophy. It wasnt that big a match, but India had to gain some momentum here and get some good batting practice. Sehwag showed some good signs of getting back into form, but again played a very careless shot and gifted away his wicket. Ganguly and Laxman played sensibly and steadied the ship. But, it was Dravid and Kaif who finally played some real good cricket, with some quick singles and doubles to get the India to a respectable total of 290. Kaif was unlucky to remain unbeaten on 49, when he faced the last ball, but couldnt score a single run. Pathan and Bajji bowled very good and put the breaks on Kenya. The worst part for India was that they just couldnt cleanup Kenya and they managed to take only 7 Kenyan wickets. This is only place where India needs to improve. They somehow find it very difficult to cut off the tail.

Arsenal carried on their winning streak beating Fulham today 3-0. Reyes, kept his record of scoring in all the 6 matches of Arsenal. It was once again some great and unselfish passes that helped Arsenal win today. Arsenal are now leading the Primiership table.

There was one more tennis match going on between Hewitt and Johansson [ who happened to be Hewitt's sister's boyfriend ], in the semifinals of the US Open. But this match turned out to be a piece of cake for Hewitt and he won it in 3 straight sets. Tomorrow is the finals. Hewitt will be playing the winner of Henman and Federer.

Ajja aala re ...

My oldest friend, Ajay, came to my house this weekend, on his way back to the US of A. It was good to meet him face-to-face [ we keep interacting a lot through e-mails ] after a period of 2 years !! We spent the whole of the Saturday evening shopping, till our legs could no longer bear our own weights.

Earlier in the day, we spent 2 long hours of TT. It was great to be playing against him again. The last time we played, it was in our final year at KREC, and we were nothing more than amateurs. He definately has improved a hell lot since those days in TT. Its good to know that there is someone whom you can beat, or that there is still someone whom i need to beat ;-). We were completely exhausted by the time we finished playing around 15 to 20 games in those 2 hours. We did have a few close matches reaching deuce too. It was none-the-less great fun.

Lunch was at our very own "Dimpy's Punjabi Dhaba" :-), our usual paratha and egg burji :p, followed by a sound sleep in the afternoon. It was only in the evening that we realised how much tired we were after playing those TT matches. In the evening we went to Music World. Ajja has now started a new interest in VCDs. We searched a lot for our great Jaggesh movies, and we actually found 2. But, we were disappointed to not find, "Bal nanna maga", his superhit movie in Kannada. Well, may be we can find it some other time ;-). In the same old vein of trying out new things, we tried a new restaurant at Residency road for the dinner. It was a good gujju/rajasthani restaurant with a nice "Jee bharke khao" punch line.

On Sunday, we had a get together with our KREC friends, Nagya and Amar, though Rajya could not come because his silly bike got punctured in the heavy rains that lashed Bangalore. We met at Amoeba for a game of bowling. It was my first try at the game, and i was quite impressive with 116 points !! I dont know if it was more of fluke and luck, but i somehow managed to score the highest :-) Later we went for another round of purchasing, buying a "butterfly" TT bat for Ajay.

And, well the day ended watching the sweet victory of India against England at Lords. This Indian team seems to be having a great liking for Lords. The matches here have been very inspiring for them. Hope this victory yesterday, gives them the proper impetus that they need to boost up their spirits and win the ICC Champions Trophy starting this week.