tuxmaniac’s blog

Do you need to plan it to the last detail for getting any event successful? Do you need to have huge “conference rooms” to exchange ideas? Here is Barcamp, an event that dumps these myths into the trash!! Its always been a great experience and learning for me at the barcamps in Bangalore. This time too was not different. Good Food, Apt ambience and many “diversified” people made Barcamp Bangalore 4, an event to cherish. The idea of having collectives worked very well especially with groups having less number of people. A new addition to the barcamp culture was the SMS Update service which always kept me informed of the happenings all over the venue. (At times I thought I was being spammed ) WiFi was all over, giving me download rates of about 350 Kbps. Yes! You read it right Check the screenshot if you still did not believe what you just read.

I spent most of the time in the Mobile Collective where there were talks on Zook, Using N-Series phones as webcams, WWigo, GPSWatcher and some nice overview from the guys at Microsoft research foundation about their research activities. Photo Collective was another of my favourites where I got some really nice tips on How to make full use of *NOT* DSLR Digi Cams, some nice overview on post processing of photographs and other informations regarding Photography.

Yet another first timer was the “Unband Collective” , a collective for people interested in music. These folks added rhythm to the already amazing ambience. And ofcourse there were the evergreen Lawn, Corridor, Lunch and floor talks and discussions. It was yet another chance to link “IRC Nicknames” to “real faces and names” . To ice it up, there was grande musical finale too this time. BCB4 was lot of fun!!! Waiting for BCB5 now in November 2007

Check my entire flickr set of BCB4 here.

I unusually was not *that* lazy this weekend. Finished several tasks.

1. Merged Onkar’s branch of gnusim8085 to the trunk. There is a conflict with one of the language specification file of gtksourceview which I think I will do after consulting him.

2. Got my cycle pedal repaired. Now its in Top form and has already set 25 Kms of Bangalore Roads on fire this weekend.

3. Uploaded quite a lot of my Deutschland photos. Neatly organised them. Keeping things organised is really a talent whatever be it . Here are the new uploads; New Parties in Deutschland Set, New Hildesheim Set, New Hamburg Photos, Updated the XPS m1210 photoset. Still to upload several Netherlands photos and more party pics. May be next weekend.

4. Did some Book reading.

5. Checked out ScummVm and got addicted to the Flight of the Amazon Queen.

6. Did some Photo stitching tutorial using Hugin and other scripts. Its fun. I am gonna go deeper into this sometime.

Today I came across a very interesting article claiming to be an interview of Bjarne Stroustrup by the IEEE Computer Magazine. The entire dialog can be found in this link below.

http://geekswithblogs.net/chrishan/articles/72646.aspx

Old one. But very interesting. Thought I would share it with others too. Have fun.

After some really long delays, Sean had announced the opening of the “Shipping dates” of the Neo1973 in his post to the Openmoko Community list here. Having promised no further delays in the production of the GTA02 and with hardware being upgraded including 3D accelerometers, better proc and wifi chipset, I think I will go for the Neo in October. That gives me some buffer financially too .

I came across a nice extension for firefox. Its the “Search keys” extension which allows you to select search results without using the mouse or the touchpad. Every search result comes in with a number suffixed beside it. You just have to hit the respective key on the keyboard and off you go into the link. Using Ctrl + that number opens the link in a new tab. Coolness! Just what I want to reduce further my usage of mouse which is already diminishing greatly.

Find the extension at

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/339