FOSS.in/2009 Day 4: cd
Posted: Dec 05, 2009, 19:26The last day of FOSS.in. Kartik wakes me up saying "You have to pack, get up". I got up, went across the hall and rang Ram2's bell a few times to wake him up.
So I packed up my stuff and got ready. This time I did not forget to wear my fedora. We had our breakfast and realized that a number of people had left early, either for the venue or to meet someone in the city. When we went out to our bus, we found that it was not there. We started talking to rickshaw drivers and bargaining with them when one guy came up to us saying that he was here to take some people from the hotel to NIMHANS. That was us. But we weren't sure, so we had him call his boss and confirmed that it was indeed us.
Susmit: "Well, if he wanted to drop us to the venue then why are we wasting time calling people? Why not just pile into the bus and go ;)".
So we finally reached the venue, only to find that it was almost deserted. People started crawling in quite late and the place eventually filled up. I sat down with Kital at the Fedora booth and fixed my package submission for Fedora. At 12:00 I went up to Lennart's FSH talk, but did not find it as useful as the previous talk. He could just have combined this one with the last talk and done one marathon talk, but I guess that would have been too long. Anyway, it was time for lunch.
I was pretty listless after lunch because there wasn't enough time to hack on anything significant, so I decided to take a nap at the booth. I woke up to find that I had only 20 minutes to say good bye to all the people I came to know during these 5 days. Wait, a phone call. An automated message telling me that my flight had been delayed by half an hour. Well, I had some more time now, so I went up to the hack centre to check out who was doing what. I bugged Gopal for the Speaker kit and he finally shooed me off with some stickers. I told him that the coordinators had done a great job, something I managed to notice this time since I was not sitting in the corner and hacking like last year.
While I was roaming about, I entered the Gnome POTD and saw Oliviere Crete giving a talk on Telepathy. I sat down and listened. And I have to admit that I was quite impressed with the layout. I remember wondering why I was working on getting ayttm and libyahoo2 up to speed when such a wonderful effort was underway to do messaging the *right* way. Now that I think of it though, it is not the only right way to do things. While ayttm may not be as extensible as the Telepathy framework+Empathy, etc, it has a totally different use case. To be able to fit into a sub-1 MB package and work well with minimal dependencies. And it can work on *BSD. The workout participation for ayttm unfortunately fizzled out since it was pulled off the itinerary and it is not popular or cool enough for people to want to contribute to it. But I managed to make some headway into the chat window stuff and will hopefully get that out of the way soon. Next week I plan to work on the webcam stuff for yahoo at Rahul's request. OK, I digressed.
I had to leave the talk halfway since I was getting late. I stepped out of the hall and managed to say goodbye to everyone I recognized and could catch hold of. I managed to find Pradeepto just as I hauled my bags up to leave. We said our goodbyes and I left for the gate, trying to find a rickshaw. But what I found was a bus, a BIAS-7 going to the airport :)
So I'm now sitting in the airport lounge reflecting back on one of the best events I've attended so far. This was very special for me because I got to know a lot of very good guys: Pradeepto, Aanjhan, Sayamindu, Joerg, Gopal, Susmit and so many others. The best part of the week was the BoF sessions all of us would have in Pradeepto's room, talking about foobar and sharing stories. I did not have too many uber hacks to talk about through this week, but a lot of cool incidents that seemed to make a big difference to the way I thought about the Indian FOSS movement and the people involved.
This was fun. I hope I get to do this more often.