Curiosity

As kids we question anything and everything. Kids ask questions that we, as adults don’t bother to. Something somewhere definitely went wrong. Curiosity and the urge to explore seems to be inversely related to age. What we forget is that there is pleasure in exploring and finding things out. Check this short 10 minute teaser “Pleasure of finding things out” by Richard Feynman [youtube video]. The book is a highly recommended read too. Curiosity is the fuel for all inventions and development. Open source encourages one to explore the details and cultivates self-learning capabilities – a trait which the world’s “education” system fails to induce in individuals.

Sharing and Collaboration

Computing and computers have evolved from  Pascal’s Adder to today where we are constantly on the look out for power sockets. Over these years the term “Hacker” emerged. Hacker is any person who likes to explore details of a system and extend their functionality as opposed to most people who prefer to learn the bare minimum. Hackers love to share and collaborate. Not the type of collaboration with an evil back-door plan. There is nothing unethical about hacking. A simple example are the Bulletin Board Systems that existed in the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, where “hackers” usually restricted by geographical boundaries or within universities logged in, shared information and collaborated on ideas. Very much similar to today’s globalised user forums and mailing lists. A typical example in today’s setup is github. One feature that stands out is the “fork” feature. It allows you to share and collaborate in a true global sense. This is the true spirit of open source. Thanks to Claudio who pointed me to this example. Bottom line – “Sharing and Collaboration is the key”.

Fun and Friendship

Over the last 5 years, since FOSS.IN 2005 I have participated in various conferences like Freed.in, GNUnify, FOSSMeet@NITC, Barcamp Bangalore and many more. I have made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun. Its such a good feeling to know the availability of a couch to sleep in most parts of the world. This by far remains my top take away. Bottom line is to have fun in whatever you do. I quote Randy Pausch – ” Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress. When you’re pissed off at someone and you’re angry at them, you just haven’t given them enough time. Just give them a little more time and they almost always will impress you.” I recommend seeing “The Last Lecture” video followed by reading this book.

And one more thing

Preach CULTURE of Free software.

NOT the politics / philosophy

Before you go bonkers over my statement, hold your fire until the end of this post. In 2006, I had been to many colleges preaching the GNU philosophy, the 4 freedoms and all the “correct” terminologies like “open source” , “Free software” etc. I would have talked to atleast 1000+ students creating awareness. I do respect the freedoms and the philosophy of GNU/Free Software. But this is not what you go around preaching when you are talking to students. After many workshops, I started to feel something was wrong. Change of strategy was needed. I started talking to students about specific projects and making them curious about specific technologies, introduced them to opportunities in Google Summer of Code, encouraged them to explore, share and in general have a lot of fun. This completely changed the game.  As examples, two students Madhusudhan and Santosh, who in 2007 were doubtful about their abilities, today are rockstars in their own way. I can name a whole bunch of folks like this who deserve more than a “Great going folks! Keep it up.”

Its time for #OperationPayback

Most conferences in India are often pounded with negativities and politics. In the end all that matters is what the participants take away from a conference. If a conference has managed to stir up a little amount of curiosity on a certain technology, helped you share information, discover something new or meet like minded people and network, it is a good sign. FOSS.IN has done that to me over the years. When I requested the audience to stand up if they have explored a piece of code that they have never looked at before, shared some knowledge with others or met atleast one new friend this year or at any of the previous editions of FOSS.IN, there was not a single soul in my vicinity sitting down. Hats off to Team FOSS.IN to have made this happen. Thank you and bye bye FOSS.IN. You will be missed…


* Apology – a formal written defense of something you believe in strongly

** Pictures were taken from a few presentations I attended over the years, CC licensed – flickr. Links will be updated soon in the slides on slideshare.

[No specific order]

• Security in Mobile Devices – Tobias Mueller [BOSSA 2010 Slides]
• Linux Kernel Security: Adapting 1960s Technology to Meet 21st Century Threats – James Morris [LinuxCon 2010 Slides]
• OsmocomBB: Protocol stack and baseband firmware for GSM mobile phones – Harald Welte [Linux Kongress 2010 Slides]
• Operating System Caches in a virtualized environment – Balbir Singh [Linux Symposium 2010 Proceedings - PDF]

If you are interested in the topics which Philip Tellis, Mahendra are talking, do attend. They are pretty good speakers and you can be assured of an increase in your knowledge level. Of-course the above mentioned talks are not yet scheduled but thats my pick as of now.

This time around Santosh Vattam and myself are taking leads in having a RTEMS Workout. We have put up the pre-requisites, purpose and general outline on the wiki page here. Currently we are stream lining the objectives into being more specific. If everything goes well, we will be kick starting the workout with a basic introduction to RTEMS, a quick overview of the architecture, a walk through of source code structure and some basic knowledge sharing wrt what might be required during the next 4 days. So Day 1 would mostly be setting up and getting up to base. Day 2, 3 and 4 would be hard days filled with coding, debugging and lots of fun! Day 5 would be more of a wrap up – collecting patches, cleaning up things, sanity checks and reporting!

So, if you want to see your contributions go into NASA and ESA space shuttles then RTEMS workout is the place you need to head to. RTEMS community is a bunch of extremely nice people full of patience and am sure you will have fun hacking with us.

On a sidenote, I am currently at Zurich Airport calculating the probability of missing my connecting flight given that my first flight is delayed, life is full of mathematics. Number never fail to impress me. See you at FOSS.IN 2009!

I had missed the first day of FOSS.IN due to personal reasons and my FOSS.IN journey started from the second day. After the usual “hello”(s) and the *hugs* all around, it was time to sit down for the planned GNUSim8085 workout. I had not expected much of a gathering here so decided to take up a small BOF place. But to my surprise we had about 12 people (If I still remember the numbers right), and we started off hacking. I had put down a list of to dos on the white board available and thats how it started. The result 2 bug fix patches, 2 feature enhancements, windows port syntax highlighting problem fixed and we are all set for a windows release. Yes!!!! Target reached but because of the last two weeks of the semester I have been extremely busy (well put infinity to it) and hence could not make a release. Thanks to all those who joined in and special thanks to Krishna Baradhwaj, Madhusudhan, Vattam, Aditya et al. for pitching in with those wonderful patches. *Kudos*

Even after foss.in these guys are continuing to work on the project and the sudden increase in the devel list traffic says it all. Next stop was the preparation for my talk on “Fedora Electronics Laboratory”. Fedora 10 had just been released and with that ofcourse my favourite FEL10 based on KDE4. Well I must say two things here. KDE4 has suddenly seems to have become usable for me and FEL10 rocks as always. Chitlesh and me went through every point that needs to be talked at the event, with me actually doing a run through of the presentation on IRC just to ensure I dont miss anything and I had some log to look back to check if had missed some thing.The presentation as such went well with an expected turn out. The success part of it is that a couple of people actually came forward and started asking questions on specific areas of the devel time line I had shown during the talk and were ready to start off. Apart from this Rahul and me had an offline discussion as to how we could improve things in the spin and a couple of ideas popped out. One idea that was interesting was to have a menu structure clearly partitioning the various tools present and what for it is used. For e.g. One Menu item would be ASIC Flow, another one could be Simulators, etc. This would let users have a clear understanding of what tool is present and what it can be used for. The current challenge is that most of the tools are command line based. So we must now find a solid way to communicate the entire set of tools present in FEL along with its purpose.

The couple of reviews that I had planned did not happen because of infrastructure issues as always. Bad me. I should have got the required files downloaded prior. But nevertheless, electric has got approved already and will be in the next Fedora Electronic Lab DVD Chitlesh has been working extremely hard on getting more packages into Fedora Electronics Laboratory. Though this is good news, we are now left with the challenge of documentation and QA to give the end users a pain free experience. (*whispers*  Someone said they will help out with the documentation and having a few quick start tutorials in place at foss.in *whispers*)

 
I have now got loads of tasks in the free software world to complete and also in my academic life. Its getting interesting and all the more challenging.I missed meeting quite a few people but at the same time happy to have met a lot of my good old buddies and potential contributors. Thanks to team FOSS.IN for giving the Free Software world this wonderful opportunity to interact and “Get things done”. A lot more happened but this blog report is already reaching its limit. So I stop here and let you enjoy the pictures on flickr with the tag fossin2008 And I love my t-shirt which actually has my IRC nick “tuxmaniac” printed on it It would really be cruel to end this blog post without thanking Fedora and my respected good old motivator. Thank you everyone and looking forward to more such “getting things done” conferences.

PS: It really is a co-incidence that almost all the photos I am in at foss.in 2008 is with me wearing the Red Hat.

We shall decide whether we end up in the lawns, corridor or elsewhere on Wednesday morning. Since all the 4 guys who have shown interest until now are known guys to me, hopefully it shouldnt be difficult to find them.

Looking forward to it, because this is where everything started for me.. FOSS.IN 2005. See you at FOSS.IN 2008.

If you are still clueless as to what FOSS.IN is all about  (even after reading through this sentence) then it probably isn’t for you And the news is I will be saying “Hola”, “Bonjour”, “Hi”, “Hallo”, “Nihao”, “Namaskara”, “Vanakkam”, “Namasthe” to a lot of my friends this year too.  Apart from the “scheduled” talk on “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” on Friday (yes, my talks always coincide with a more glamorous session *always*), I have planned to have some workouts (unofficial ones from those listed on the site). One such planned workout is the GNUSim8085 Workout.

If you are interested in taking part, please use this doodle link to give your preferred time and I will blog about the timings sometime around Sunday evening. The venue of the workout is most probably the terrace or corridor or some place which has a free power socket .
The Current agenda of the workout is as follows:

1. Get the Windows Version of the package released (long time pending and also means people with “official” laptops running Windows are welcome and wanted for testing)
2. Fix lying around small bugs.
3. Brainstorm on further development and maybe get a base framework done on one of these ideas.

Looking at the current state of things it could either happen on Wednesday or Thursday. This is just not it. Some Fedora and Debian work will also be done. Details in another blog. See you then.

PS for Students: I believe this is a very apt small package to start contributing to Free software. You are the most welcome. This doesn’t mean oldies are prohibited .

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is believed to be the greatest experiment ever conducted with thousands of scientists collaborating on finding the beginning of the universe. Now, FOSS.IN, the conference which was the prime force behind my contributions to the Free Software world has announced its experiment. A major change in the event format this year. Read the full details here.

I consider this the Greatest Indian FOSS Experiment . Its a move that requires great courage. The focus has been made more clear this time (not that it was not clear last year). “Talk is cheap, show me the code” is getting more visibility. Yes, its going to be the first “Developer” conference in India. Hats Off, Team FOSS.IN. My chances of getting there and finishing off all the todo hacks looks bleak because I am miles away from Bangalore, but will try my best. So ladies and gentlemen, get your wiki pages ready, your brains sharpened and start jotting down your plan for FOSS.IN 2008. Be there and show your code to the world. I am sure its gonna ROCK.
Rant: I am not so happy with the organisers calling “Packaging tasks” as “low hanging fruit”. I am upset a bit because its not such a mundane task as mentioned in the mail, that too from TEAM FOSS.IN.

As things are shifting to top gear we are facing quite some issues with respect to printing Tees. Due to various reasons the printer with whom we were planning to give the order for has backed out and now we need a replacement. If someone has any information on Printers in Bangalore, who can print around 30 Tees in 6-7 days, we would be immensely grateful. If so please ping either technofreak or me offline.

First Update from the Ubuntu-IN team. The sticker designs are out.

Go grab ‘em all at Debian/Ubuntu Project Day on Dec 4th 2007. More goodies to follow. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hold your breath!! Its big than ever before!!

Thanks to Niyam for helping us out with the designs.