Bar Camp Hyderabad: Apr, 2006

The first ever Barcamp in Hyderabad turned out to be huge success. The number of ppl attending (participating ? ) went to be over 200. IIIT Hyderabad was fortunately able to uphold the sudden increase in number of registrants. Great organization by Ramesh, Rajan, Rajat, Sunil, Tarun and many others.

Coming to the content part. I was surprized to see the amount of information flow that happened during the presentations. Many ppl in the industry are amazing too was my conclusion, really. There were presentations by Ramesh and Jay from Pramati which gave a broad overview of Web 2.0 and opportunities in the space respectively.

There was a presentation by Rajan on how attention rather than information is the new thing to focus in Web 2.0, Pramati guys spoke about XForm which I only heard of earlier, the presentation was really informative.

The Cordsys guys then spoke about the whole overview of limitation of HTML, then introducing XForm based artichitecture and gave a wonderful demo of their product which is like a nice GUI designer toolkit running over web browser.

Prof. Kamal from IIIT spoke about the MeraSystem project. Which he explained wonderfully well and removed lots of confussion I had about the whole WebOS thing. The main focus of the webOS is on centralizing data and not processing alone as is mostly interpretted.

Sumeet from Yahoo then spoke about Yahoo UI libraries, and a lot more about interesting use of some popular opensource products at yahoo and Yahoo’s Contribution back to community. Pretty interesting to know that they use MySql for some of their heavy backends and Php quite extensively. New terms like JSON, Serealized PHP and others also popped up.

Kiran from Pramati spoke about the Eclipse in the Web 2.0 space and Usability impact. Sometime in middle there was talk by Sharad Solanki on the Tangible User Interface and Web 2.0 interface, pretty interesting comparision and conclusions to take home.

Kiran from Pramati spoke about the Eclipse in the Web 2.0 space and Usability impact. Sometime in middle there was talk by Sharad Solanki on the Tangible User Interface and Web 2.0 interface, pretty interesting comparision and conclusions to take home.
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FlickrExport Gets better

Has been long since I updated the app(in fact a plugin). Today when I wanted to upload photos to flickr again and I decided to first improve the app. (Isn't it nice, you can change the app you want to use , well thats why opensource rocks)

Since Most reader don't know what I am talking about. I wrote and maintain a simple plugin for Uploading photos from Digikam (and some other KDE image viewers etc). Digikam FYKI is a powerful image management application for *nix. Do try it out if you like to play with images.

Some one else also requested this functionaly to directly upload the selection of image in the host application like Digikam, Kimdaba or gwenView. This is of course useful since you can use the best selection etc functionality of you app and then directly upload them rather than using the limited File Selection dialog of KIPI.

Trying desktop decoration :)

Well I never cared about those stuff until Jagmohan asked me if there are “Themes in Linux like Windows?”. I thought there must be lot of such stuff so just went to http://kde-look.org and looked for themes. Sorted them on number of downloads. I got the theme name Bhagira, somehow the name looked familiar (may be ppl posted their desktop screenshot with this name). Grabbed it. Compiled and installed on my Work Machine a Fedora Core 3 box (On my room’s test bed system with KDE 3.5 there seem to be some compilation error probably because of QPainter class).

These screenshots are in this config: GNU/Linux distro FC3+KDE3.3+Superkaramba+Baghira (theme in KDE styles and window Decoration)
Here are some screenshots. The OSX bar at the bottom is due to superkaramba.

Oops!!! I mistakenly uploaded pngs to Flickr. Not only got my quote depleted too soon. It will probably be difficult to load too, sorry guys

Being a Linux Enthusiasts and not a Linux Zealot

The title might suck but then its not always easy to summarize things in title.Very often Linux enthusiats are called Linux Zealot. I decided to find out the reason behind why ppl like me and many other get so passionate about simple things like an OS. I have figured out at least one big reason for this: the sense of Ownership. Don’t think I am gonna write about the Freedom etc stuff, I don’t really philosophize that a lot.

By Ownership I mean willingness to accept responsibility and also to change the situation towards betterment. The most direct example I find in my excessive support of KDE compared to GNOME or any such WM whenever there comes a situation for debate. Though I was always impressed with the GUI the KDE guys brought to Linux Desktop, but the obsession comes more due to a second reason : My excite ment of developing something, albeit a small one, for the KDE. (Though when I started my initial bias towards KDE was a major reason for putting my efforts at becoming a KDE contributor rather than trying something Gnome-ish)

The same situation holds true with most Open Source Software (OSS) users. When you ask them any scopes for improvement they can positively show you many and also accept many of your suggestions, but one thing they don’t like is OSS being criticized by those one sided people. The normal users do understand that lots of improvement is possible but they also understand that they can contribute and improve equally well as any other person and the software is their own. They see it their responsibility to make the situation better rather then just whine for it being not the best. Being a part of the sucha big community of like minded is a unique feeling in itself.

There is a important thing that I have learnt by experience, Its no use being a pro supporter for any OS or software during a clash of views with ppl who don’t really want to change their opinions. Much better way to spend your precious time would be directly get involved in development of the same software (OS level development may be a bit bigger milestone) and improve it. Ultimately thats the the best advantage of OSS and the experience and learning is worth the time being spent in it. Your contribution to the community would also be much more appreciated.

Well for timepass I do enter in debates, promoting my favourites software to ppl who care to listen. So post like why KDE rules and so on will still keep coming.

Bad Bad Luck at felicity competitions … :(

Yesterday evening, I was informed that our team( different partners) secured good positions in both the contest prelims. Today’s final turned out to be not so gr8 after that earlier performance.

In Debug the C-Bug, Ranjith and Me(I?) were doing quite well, until we realized we just didn’t have to debug the program but get the desired output which was given. (Ranjith had earlier experience of Debug and has describe to me that we will be given a code and will need to find out what the code is about and make it work. When we were going to show our solved 4 questions, we realized we actually near the correct output in only two of them. Later I spent lot of time in the first question and didn’t give much time for Ranjith to do the second question, which was almost solved. After the contest Ranjith described the exact answer to me, and we are still blaming each other for getting the Second Position and not the first. Which we missed by only one question.

In Java Jargon, Sachin and me formed the team. it was a total hardluck, we solved so many questions wrong … Not that we didn’t know them but because of no coming back rule maybe. You were suppose to answer the question or leave it before going to next one and there was no coming back. We did the contest too early and didn’t utilize the whole team. I do take the blame for that but also blame the organizers for creating quite some confusion with some wrong questions and not keeping enough supply of questions. We didn’t get any prize in this contest.

BTW yesterdays’ evening programmes were Awesome. I am gonna blog about them when I get more time.