Skip to main content

Wrapping up at foss.in@2008

With the start of 5th day, starts the end of a journey. A journey of talks, presentations, discussions, BoFs and of course the workouts at foss.in accompanied by a nice not-too-hot-not-too-cold rainy climate in Bangalore, negated by the depressed concerns about the terrible happenings back in Mumbai.

About the event, my personal highlights have been the talks, workouts and BoFs around Indic computing. It is interesting how the language computing forms a significant part of almost any foss event in India. The collation workout, Indic BoF, talks on text-to-speech, speech recognition, machine translations all went fine along with my own talk about language i18n support accompanied by Pravin on very first day. On other notes, the Nokia stall very well showcased maemo and N810, with the talks inline with the applications it runs.

The workout on collation helped update the status of all the Indic sorting and proceed with the remaining ones like Malayalam. Bengali still remains uncertain. It was nice to see how OLPC's 'sugar' attempts at going away from the traditional metaphors of files and folders, just something I had mentioned a day before in my presentation where I talked about the metaphoric localization. Apart from some formative steps in Indic Computing, what we could found is the students eager to contribute and the Tibetan community of developers in India.

Although the Talk was cheap this time, my feeling was that except for few, workouts were mostly dried up. I am not sure how much real code it produced but what I really missed there is the drive to attract more contributors. The talks probably did it better. May be next time they need to revise the concept.

Overall things have been good, not as huge as last year, but that could be intentional.

Have to return by today evening, means I'll miss the party!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

PVR is so wierd!

Yesterday we went second time to a mall bit far from office to complete the earlier failed mission of watching this 3D movie, Clash of the Titans. On ticket counter, we were first told that evening show was house full. Then we asked for a night show, and were told there isn't any show then and the gentleman handed us the pamphlet of all movie schedules. We checked on the nearby digital kiosk and also on the printed schedule to be sure of the show timings. Then went to second counter, and asked the lady for the night show tickets, and without any problem got the tickets for back seats. In fact this show was hardly 20% full, wonder how the evening show became houseful. But the biggest wonder/blunder is yet to come. On the entrance we were stopped for having a laptop bag along with (we had went straight after the office). In spite of having checked the bag, we were not allowed, because laptops were not allowed inside! Then we asked for keeping it at the baggage counter. But then, the...

Would you look through a window or go out and play in open?

Freedom of knowledge has always been worshiped across philosophies and religions all over the world. It has been applicable to the most fields of science and technology. This freedom has helped the growth of science, technology, and benefited the human world in every aspect. When Jonas Salk invented polio vaccine, he said "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" He did not try to hide its formula. When you buy a car, nobody stops you from opening its bonnet, fix a few problems, do a few modifications. That, is the freedom of knowledge, applied throughout the branches of science. But when it comes to software, abruptly, everyone starts hiding the source code, the formula behind it. You would be even denied from making similar kind of products, by means of patents. Some of the readers might have already guessed where I am taking this topic to. [Those who know enough about foss, may skip the following paragraph.] When you buy a software, it is most likely that you would...

The Kreate logo is done!

It's been several months now that we have been brainstorming about the logo and caption. We all were thinking on lines of both creativity and value offerings. Gautam was continuously thinking on lines of how to communicate imagination and implementation parts simultaneously, the left and right of the brain. Many tag-lines popped up, but always there was something missing. Finally, me and joy took up these two words from Gautam and simply put a dot between them. It sounded so crisp! 'Imagination.Implementation'! Meanwhile, many of us were trying to come up with the design ideas. For me, playing with various shapes of 'K' and using whatever minuscule knowledge of calligraphy/typography I had, became my regular pass-time to keep myself awake in gaseous classrooms. In later stages, I got stuck on the idea of creating a character out of K that can personify the values we worked on so long. Finally emerged the k-man that is so carefree, cheerful, and aesthetic. Joy took t...