Last week, I attended FOSS.in, and in short, it was awesome. The organisation was superb, the weather was fine (well, maybe not for people who do not like a drizzle or two), and the food was excellent. Many people had doubts regarding the efficacy of the workouts, and in the end, almost all of the workouts had some concrete results to show, which, I would say is a major achievement, considering that each workout lasted for only around 3 hours. There was occasional problems with the bandwidth, but with an event of this size, minor glitches are bound to happen.

My Sugar/OLPC talk went OK-ish, though it did seem to generate a lot of enthusiastic queries and discussions. It was quite a pleasant surprise on the next day, when a few guys came up to me, asking me to help them with their Sugar installation in Ubuntu and Fedora. Moreover, on the penultimate day, Nirbheek, Piyush and I stayed up till late in the night, excitedly discussing possible Sugar activities that can be developed/adopted. The XO-s, as usual were crowd pullers, and since there were three of them (I was carrying two, Kushal one), we also ran stock Fedora 10 with GNOME on one of them (booting off a SD card). At a certain point, we also ran the Fedora KDE spin on one of the XOs, much to the delight of Pradeepto-da and the rest of the gang in the KDE stall.

I spent most of the time in the Fedora stall, and it’s really awesome to see the enthusiasm of the Fedora guys. The most common query seemed to be “Do you guys have a copy of F-10?”, and unfortunately, initially, we did not have that. Afterward though, thanks to t3rmin4t0r, we had ISOs available, and quite a few enthusiastic visitors copied them into their portable hard drives/usb sticks. Kushal was slightly over-enthusiastic with his camera (both the still and motion varieties), though he did come up with some totally amazing stuff. Going by the number of DSLR carrying shutterbugs at the event (including yours truly), some have proposed renaming the event to Camera.in for 2009. While talking with the rest of the Fedora guys, I also discovered Kobold, which can be quite useful for distributing Sugar based live images to interested people at events.


I also had some interesting discussions on various Indic related stuff (going back to my roots with Gora, Santhosh, Rahul and Pravin. It was mostly comparing notes, and I figured out that this bug in glibc affects all Indic scripts, and not just Bengali. Gora’s session on collation and spell-checking was also pretty interesting, especially since doing affix support in Aspell for Bengali has been on my TODO list for a long time.
In the end, Foss.in is one of those few conferences, which reinforce the feeling of belonging to a community in you. It turns IRC nicks into real human beings, and takes your sense involvement in the community to a new level altogether. Free/Open Source is about more than sharing a common set of beliefs, or a common set of ideas, or having a common set of skills. Free Software brings people having similar passions together, and then creates a bond of friendship between them. It’s about enjoying something together, having fun together, and personally to me, that is perhaps the most important thing. Thanks to FOSS.in, and the Fedora project for letting me have this wonderful opportunity.

My only disappointment during the conference was Karunakar. This was the first time in nearly five years, where both of us have been to the same conference, and I have not been able to take a picture of him dozing off. However, Kushal did manage to get an awesome picture of his teeth, and unknown to him, this picture was the subject of a headline in the first page of the Indlinux wiki, for around an hour or so.

Karunakar's teeth

Last week I took a mini vacation and went to a trip to the Sundarbans (the largest Mangrove forest in the world, formed on the delta of the Ganga and the Bramhaputra). I hadn’t realized that it was so close – Gosaba, which is the gateway to the forests is only around 2 and a half hours drive from my house. (we took a “package tour”, which minimized the hassles as we got a car taking us from Kolkata to Gosaba, and at Gosaba a launch was waiting to take us into the forest)

We arrived on a day when Cyclone Reshmi was approaching the region, and the first night in the forest was to put it mildly… interesting . Fortunately the skies cleared up on the second day, and for the next two days, we had an awesome experience, including one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen in my life.

More photos in this Flickr set.

..and no – I did not see any tigers – we were busy hopping around from one watchtower to another.

• Flight back from Boston was not as bad as expected, since I was upgraded to business class .
• Had a horrible pain on my right index finger throughout the last week, and decided to stay away from computers and do some reading during the weekend. (ultimately I ended up sleeping much more that I really should)
• My old mobile phone (Motorola A780) was causing a lot of problems, and so I decided to replace it with a Nokia E71. It took me some time to get accustomed to the new UI, but apart from that, I am quite happy with it (love the keyboard and the thin design of the set).
• Managed to set up the NAS device that I had got in my home network. I was a bit worried about the device supporting only Samba, but it turned out that it runs some kind of embedded Linux set up, and enabling NFS was pretty easy.

• Summer of Code Updates
  Julen has been showing awesome progress with his SoC project. He has already completed implementing the first feature in the project roadmap, and his ideas on feature #2 looks excellent.
• Going back home
  Today, I go back home, after spending around two weeks in Cambridge. It has been an exciting and productive visit – I got the chance to interact with a lot of people, and to do a lot of brainstorming on some of the problems that have been bugging us, and my personal TODO list for the next few months seems to be quite interesting.
• Some statistics
  People often wonder about the exact number of OLPC XO-1 laptops out there. Till date,
  Number of laptops shipped: 390,000
  Number of laptops being built per month (currently): 50,000
  That would be, I guess, one of the single largest Fedora derivative deployments out there .

• For this year’s GSOC, I will be mentoring Julen Ruiz Aizpuru, who will be working on Effective user experience for Pootle.
• I badly needed a break this week, and so three of us from college went for a trip to Mandarmani, a sea side resort around 200 km from Kolkata. It is still somewhat isolated compared to the other sea side resorts nearby, and the last 7 km of our trip consisted of driving over the beach, and getting stuck in the sand, which was fun. However, due to Mandarmani’s isolation, and since we went there in the middle of the week (no weekend tourists), we had almost the entire beach to ourselves for the next two days, and it was an awesome experience. Some pictures
  
  
  
  Driving on the beach

  
  Desolate beach, dotted with red crabs

  
  The beach

  
  Sunset