tuxmaniac’s blog

Its hectic down here but I am loving it. Long stays in the labs and full freedom. What more do you need? I am beginning to find time for Free Software and hopefully now this will be consistent as I am getting used to things here and have fairly settled down. Some quick updates.

• I lost my beloved camera. I don’t want to talk more than that about it.
• Upgraded to Intrepid Ibex Beta and guess what?!! The entire Upgrade took me less than 2 hours. The fastest Upgrade I have ever done. Advantages of being in a Western school
• Attending Barcamp Lausanne this Saturday. Planning to give a talk on Free Software in Education (someone already put it on the wishlist!!)
• My to do hacks is growing. Have found a lot of improvement opportunities in the world of Free Software VLSI CAD tools.
• And finally after a really long time I hit 5-a-day today.

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My 5 today: #280959 (terminator), #238241 (gnumeric), #165161 (compiz), #220268 (gnumeric), #280994 (hotkey-setup)
Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

After a pretty long Saturday; Took a workshop for BMSCE College guys and was busy fixing a “Hard Disk partitions go missing” issue (will blog in detail on this later), I headed for BarCamp Bangalore 5 (Winter Edition) on a cold and lazy Sunday morning. Met up with Parthan and helped him around in the Registration Desk. We saw a “Collective Sticker” and decided to write the word “Ubuntu” in the space provided. Wrote it, stuck it on our T-Shirts and immediately a registrant asks “Where is the Ubuntu Collective happening?”. We looked at each other and said, ” Yeah!!! Hmm.. We havent decided yet.”. After similar queries from a couple of more guys we thought may be we could actually set up a BoF. We decided on the time, place and pinned it up on the schedule board. In the beginning, there were a couple of people and we started discussing on Possible projects, Experiences using Ubuntu, Ubuntu-IN Community, FOSS.IN project day and lots more. We actually ended up having 20-25 odd people with issues like “My Wireless doesnt work in Ubuntu. Is there a way out?”, “I want to connect my mobile to my laptop using bluetooth in Ubuntu. What should I do?” and lots more. People pointed out various sites and references and exchanged interesting ideas. the conversation even shifted to Ubuntu Mobile Team, Android, iphone and the likes. I showed them a small demo on the Bluetooth remote control and headed for lunch. An unexpected Collective ends on a happy note.

After lunch, we lazed around, met Hobbes`, dumbhead, vegpuff, tuxplorer and chatted away to glory! It was time to move out of BCB5 and head for dinner. Dumbhead took us to V.V.Puram’s Food Street. Man o Man, its a must visit for food lovers. The entire street has only “Road side eateries” serving right from Gulcand icecreams, Idlis, Benna Dosas, Pav Bhaji and chat items at a very economical price. All you delegates coming in for Foss.in take note of this place and ask your geeky/fossy friend to take you for dinner here (especially the mumbaikars ). Weekend comes to an end.

Special appreciation: Dumbhead, I have to appreciate your action towards that poor woman who asked for food. Hats off dude!

Complete photoset here

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.