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.

• Lost my lovely little Nikon Coolpix L2 (I miss it even now)
• Became a proud owner of Nikon D60 DSLR
• Became a Fedora Electronic Laboratory team member (The dev time line calls me a consultant )
• Got my Ubuntu Membership Approved (Yes I have a @ubuntu.com and @fedoraproject.org email ids now )
• GNUSim8085 was awarded FOSS India Award by LFY magazine
• 2nd time speaker at Freed.in (Will miss this year’s edition. Its like missing a family event )
• NIT Calicut happened (3rd time) again. Miss that too this time around.
• FOSS.IN 2008 Speaker. Was great to meet the known and unknown faces again.
• Quite a few memorable trips with friends and colleagues. (I also did some snow sledging in the fag end of 2008)
• Got Admitted to a World Top 15 Engineering and Applied Sciences University and shifted base to Switzerland.
• I Quit my Nice Cosy Job as a senior Engineer and got back to Academic Environment and Research (Loving it!!)

And this year again, though I feel is not going to be that life changing is definitely going to be full of challenges, travel, loads of photography and a lot and lot of learning. Looking forward to 2009!!

PS: Around Christmas and New Year Abhijeet (I linked your flickr account. Happy now?? ) and I went around a few cities in Swiss and here goes their photos. Enjoy!!!

 

Full Flickr Sets Luzerne, Bern, Les Diablerets, Montreux

 

Last weekend was as memorable as the before one, since a couple of my good friends Ashish and Amit biked down to my place to spend the weekend. Yes!  You read it right, they drove from Bangalore to Chennai on Rane’s Thunderbird. We went on a drive on the Scenic East Coast Beach Highway stopping at Crocodile Bank and Taj’s Fisherman cove. A nice and relaxed weekend it was. For the entire flickr set click here (until the pic with the gun was taken this time) . Ashish has already blogged on it in his new blog here.

It was just not about food, travel and picnic last weekend. Hacking got its fair share too. Some updates below.

• Commited the gnusim8085 changes done at the Bangalore Hackathon to the svn after a quick re check. Thanks Onkar.
• Tested the gnusim8085.exe package for Windows. Works great with a few minor issues (like Syntax highlighting, url linking etc.). Also a installer for the same is in progress. Check screenshot here
• Onkar has already ported gnusim8085 to gtksourceview 2. Seems like quite a few clean ups also done.
• VHDL Emacs mode was packaged for Fedora by Rakesh Pandit and Review request even raised. But only to find out later that it was already a part of emacs-common. I was deeply disappointed at that quality of search done by me before raising that wishlist request. But then, everybody has a bad day. Sorry Chacha_Choudhary.
• gResistor upstream has now uploaded a fresh tarball with the full copy of the licenses included. So I have updated the package on revu. But seems like it is already too late for intrepid. But I must thank Pop Gheorghe for the update.

ToDo : We have been hit by the Wine bug 3915. If someone has faced this issue and managed to fix this please leave a comment. If we dont get this setup right, it will be very difficult for us to go in search of a Windows machine to test our gnusim8085 whenever we have to make a release. Have attached the screenshot of the issue above. Thanks in Advance.

And finally, see you from Switzerland. And do follow me on Identi.ca as I will be posting updates more frequently there until I get settled in the new country.

After a bit of emails, builds and blog readings, headed for lunch. Met Kiruba, Praveen, Anivar, Hiran and other folks. Pradeepto joined us late afternoon and headed straight to his talk on “Join the VISION – Kde”. Nice one it was. My talk on “FOSS for electronic enthusiasts” went very well with about 30-40 people attending. Then we (Pradeepto, Kart_ and myself) decided to head out to Malabar Palace for some Appam fest! Returned back to the guest house, discussed various things under the planet including Alternative Education, KDE, Packaging, Marriage, Life and what not.

We had a “Contribution to FOSS” talk the next day for which we had absolutely no preparation. Well when 3 guys are gonna present, I suppose we need some kind of a understanding. But guess what, the talk went extremely smooth and IMO message conveyed. We showed them Wiki, subversion, Bugzilla and also mentioned about IRC and mailing lists. The flow was impeccable for the amount of (almost nil) preparation which we did. Goes to show the understanding among the three of us??

It was time to head back to BLR. On the way back we made quick stops at Wayanad Pookat lake, lunch, Mysore Palace (JIT for the Sunday Evening lighting) and Kamat (dinner). Back and fresh again today to write this long post!

All in all a very relaxing trip. Taking into account the amount of hardships these NITC folks have faced over the last month with loads of speakers dropping off in the last minute, these guys have managed to finish of yet another good FOSSMeet @ NITC. Three Cheers!

Flickr Sets: Mysore Palace, FOSSMeet@NITC, Wayanad