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.
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.
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