Certified crazy

Met Pradeepto and Missus, and Anurag at our usual hangout place - Pizzeria - to get the update on their Akademy visit. Need to try out the Bachelor’s ice cream next time, now that I know the location.

I went down South last weekend for the Bangalore Flex User Group meet that Mrinal tweeted about. I reached halfway through Vandana’s OpenLaszlo talk. (Thanks to Bangalore’s famed traffic jams). The part that I attended went well, with flex users trying to grasp laszlo’s components and comparing similar alternatives available in Flex. Quite a few new people joined in too, I was told. The meet ended well with discussions on how should laszlo save its backside As always, coffee time is the best time to get a feel of the group. Met some people with brilliant ideas and trying to get them into action. Nice!

Headed to some shopping and thought of picking up something to eat at MG Road. Wasn’t hungry, so headed back with some coffee instead.

Next day was spent trying to figure out what OS to install on the new laptop, at Parthan’s place, after an awesome Thali at Nandhinee. A few hours later, I ended up buying two waitlisted tickets (both of which got confirmed btw - separate trains ofcourse) to Chennai for the next day, all the while having a confirmed KSRTC bus ticket. More has been blogged about this meet (and the goofups) by Parthan, Aanjhan and Onkar.

Next day was spent in Chennai. The flight out was delayed by almost two hours. Landed up at home at 1.45 am with Mom yelling. All attempts at breaking in quietly failed terribly.

Note to self: Next time, plan things out! (but unplanned trips like this one are awesome fun too! :D)

I head out to France to pursue a Masters degree next this month. Now, for the first time in my life, shopping seems like a daunting task.

Checked out Flex 4 from http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/trunk/

Setup instructions are precise. No major hassles at all. The part where the `detailed steps’ for setting up on linux reads:

“Come on… if you’re a Linux geek you don’t need any handholding!

That said, if you would like to contribute instructions for those without your prowess, please post them on the Developers list and we will incorporate them.”

Heh!

Reading swf files from the local machine caused a Security sandbox error. Fixed this by adding the FlexSDK.cfg file under ~/.macromedia/#Security/FlashPlayerTrust/ folder. Abdul Qabiz has a detailed post on flash player trust on GNU/Linux.

The Freemap Mumbai workshop (in the series of workshops across India sponsored by FSF-India) was at HBCSE, Mankhurd on February 7-8, 2008. Dr G Nagarjuna introduced us to the speakers Eric Schuyler and Mikel Maron who gave an awesome two day hands-on to ~20+ of the workshop attendees.

Day one had us listening to Schuyler and Mikel talk about GPS and the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project among other things. Slides are available on slideshare. After the introductory session was over, they fielded questions from us, and introductions to the participants revealed most of them were from NGOs with particularly interesting needs - like Pukar Foundation, which plans to use OSM for mapping Social demographics - especially the Dharavi area, and others like SOPPECOM which plan to use the OSM database for ecosystem management. Interesting, really.

We headed out for a quick survey to do before we gathered for lunch. The 30-odd minute survey had my partner and I go around near the Sion-Trombay road right outside HBCSE and identify some POIs.  Post lunch, we were introduced to JOSM (pronounced as `jawsum’) - the editor. The rest of the day went in importing data from the GPS devices to .gpx files and loading the traces on the OSM server and opening up the traces and waypoint files in JOSM. Schuyler used party render on the collection of traces of all participants. This video is the result of the first day at surveying.

On day two, it was decided to either correct the AND data (that was consistently erroneous for Mumbai) or start mapping parts of Mumbai again. A bunch of us, however, wanted some more serious surveying So post lunch, we headed out to the Diamond Garden area in Chembur and mapped the area, and some surrounding roads. This video should be an indication of the fun we had there.

We came back and mapped some restaurants, clinics, banks and other POIs  and uploaded the data to the OSM database. Mikel writes about his experience at the workshop and with the Mumbai traffic - “Mumbai is actually pretty pleasant when you’re in one place, it’s the moving about which causes problems.”

• The talks at Lala lajpatrai college went well.
• Spent more time travelling on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway (and the  Chembur-Sion-VileParle Mumbai darshan trip that comes free with it) than attending talks at Gnunify’08 at Pune. Reached just-in-time for the linuxchix-india talk+BoF.
• Finally got a chance to be at the Kala Ghoda Arts festival this year.
• Had awesome fun at the Freemap India workshop in Mumbai. (This calls for a separate entry)

KDE 4 had its release party on January 20, 2008. We decided to meet up for lunch at Mahesh Lunch home, Juhu.  After an awesome lunch, we cut a cake, and then headed over to Juhu beach for a stroll. Pradeepto went on a clicking spree, and we had to snap back the camera from him.

After the stroll, we decided to head over to Barista and talk a bit about conferences, KDE and some more. Fun!  More photos on flickr.

Linuxchix India had its first meet up at Mumbai on January 5, 2008. Priti, Tazz, VivekVC, Jagdish and I were present at the meet, at CCD Shivaji Park, Dadar.

It went really well. Check out the minutes of the meet and some pictures. Find out if your city has one, and if it doesn’t, plan one!

So, foss.in/2007 is over.

It was fun, mostly with all that hanging around and fooling around in the stalls and expo areas. Plenty of swag - badges, stickers, CDs, caps, mugs, pens and ofcourse t-shirts (some got umbrellas too), lots of new people to meet, hellos and how ares with old ones, some awesomely amazing food  (courtesy ramkrishna) and friggin’ cold Bangalore.

Some highlights from the trip were the freedesktop sessions, lightning talks (well, I did not know potatoes in an omlette tasted so good), those hilarious jokes at the dining table every day, puliogare rice, an awesome linuxchix.org.in BoF, kushal’s weird way of clicking photos, the konqueror party, hogging sessions at food street, full halls, OLPC opening contests,  the-laptop-with-maximum-stickers contest, arguments at BoFs and ofcourse rusty’s finale. As always, foss.in organizing team and the volunteers did a great job. Flickr is flooded with photos.

And ofcourse there are all those stupid and witty jokes that hit you when you’re surrounded by a bunch of geeks. We’ll keep a summary of them for later.

Kde-in has revealed their fall 2007 (foss.in/2007) collection of posters. Excellent design, a “people” theme, and bright colors are the highlights of the collection. The whole line is released under the the kde-in brand and the license CC-by-NC-SA.

Check them out now!

Linuxchix.org.in is planning for a BoF at Foss.in/2007. Runa did the poster and banner (check ‘em out!), and Vid is helping with publicity.

If you are a linuxchix, or someone who appreciates what the global linuxchix does, and want to help with the Indian linuxchix, or have any ideas, please help us on the ideas and suggestions page, and of course, be there at the BoF!

The exact time and date (its on Dec 6th) of the BoF shall be put up as and when it is decided. Stay tuned.

Akshay told me about the CodeCampMumbai a couple of days ago. It is like a barcamp, but you actually sit down and *write* code - by the end of the day, you have some cool hack / app. Isn’t that cool? (especially for lazy ones like me who keep putting things off weekend after weekend :P)

So, if you think you’d like to team up with someone or hack on that idea that has been in your head since ages, go ahead, register and have fun!

P.S. I’d probably hack on something Flex.. May be, use the Flex builder Linux Alpha and cook something up.