rohitj's domain

That time of year has come again. IIT Kanpur is again busy preparing for Techkriti. I don’t think I will ever forget those days. Being a part of team makes it even more exciting. Specially those 4 days of drill. I wish I was there. Last year we added another branch to Techkriti. We called it FOSSKriti. I joined the team late, but I still enjoyed it to the full. Since it was the first event of this kind in Techkriti and IIT (not just IITK) in general, things were a little blurred. We didn’t get that much attention from Techkriti. But still most of the time, the rooms we had booked for talks or hackfests were full. The event was a success. We are again organizing FOSSKriti. I am more excited about this times FOSSKriti. This time amidst all initial doubts we have better layout of the events. And we again have awesome chain of talks and hackfests. This times theme is “Open Web”.

Mozilla Corporation is sponsoring this times FOSSKriti. We have speakers from Mozilla, Opera, Yahoo, KDE, Sahana and Drupal. They will be giving talks and hackfests, apart from other small scale sessions. The details for the events can be seen here : http://techkriti.org/#/fosskriti-events/

Here are the topics for the events :

• Workshop : Web development and Open Source technologies
• Talk : An Introduction to HTML5
• Talk : Yahoo! UI
• Hackfest : Drupal 7 Patch and Development Sprint
• Talk : Open the Web
• Talk : Humanitarian FOSS: Sahana Open Source Disaster Management tool
• Hackfest: Code for Sahana in Web2Py
• Talk : Webkit and Telepathy

Apart from these events, there will be few small sessions. Go to the FOSSKriti stalls to know more about these sessions. Oh, we will have a PGP Key signing party as well. Don’t forget to go there.

So, again, we were expecting 50-60 people. Before FOSSKriti whiling planning for FOSSKriti, I was arguing with Arun saying that there wouldn’t be much participation for linux kernel workshop and we dont need 50 computers. To all my surprise, we had around 300 people interested in the workshop.

We had a Lab of 40 computers booked. We had to have 2 person per computer. We also had to kick out IITK students, and we asked them that they will have another kernel workshop. There were still non-IITK students who were kicked out because there was no place for standing the lab. We finally had 100 people inside the lab.

In evening we arranged same workshop for IITK students, in which we allowed non-IITK students as well. It again had awesome response. That even when it was clashing for i-Quiz.

Ankita Garg took the workshop. She was kind enough to take the workshop again for IITK students. People who came for the workshop varied from people who had heard about kernel for the time and people who had their “own” kernel.

Wow, I didn’t expect such an awesome response. I was thinking that only 10-20 people will come, but we had a huge participation. Rather I told Nanda, one of the guys from Cleartip.com our sponsor and IITK alumni, that we are expecting 30-40 people. Wow, we had like 60-70 people.

It was a great start for FOSSKriti. The first day itself when Techkriti team usually think that there wouldn’t be much participation, we got like 60-70 participation. Awesome. Cleartrip brought us some TShirts as well, which we gave to some participants. And we also had some Gnome badges and Gnome stickers.

The event started at 10PM. After 20-30min talk about beagle which Arun Raghavan gave, we shifted to lab, and people started hacking beagle. Well, there were people who didnt know much about beagle and linux. But still some people stayed there till 5AM. Yes,  10 guys stayed there till 5AM.

And more to it, we finally have 3 submissions from the workshop. One is a firefox extension to include beagle in the search engine list. Second is bibtex search. And third is searching in beagle for the select words in Pidgin chat box.

For last few days, I have been talking to people (mainly IITK students) about different events we have in FOSSKriti. I found people pretty enthusiastic about different events. I am pointing out those events here:

0: RoR : Y4 batch, being highly affected by Prof. TVP’s, is highly interested in attending RoR workshop. Some people want to learn RoR, some people want to discuss RoR. And I assume that some people will come because they know Saurabh Nanda.

1: Linux Kernel : Those who eff around there linux distro, especially Gentoo users, and those who have slightest interest in systems, were found interested in this.

2: Lisp : I personally am going to attend this event as a participant, not as organizing team. . And I am sure I will bring 10 more people. Actually no, some people were found interested in this workshop, specially those who are doing compilers course, or those who have done compilers course.

3: Linux Chix :

(female.isIITian())&&(female.isGeek())&&(female.hasTalkedTorohitj()) = 0

So, I am not sure how many females will turn up, but I am sure people will be there. This is the second event I want to attend. I want to see what they are upto.

4: KDE4 : Those who do not know, recently there was a big shift in IITK linux community. People broke their long loyalty for Gnome, and shifted to KDE. Alas!! KDE4 is still not in official repos, but they are still on KDE. They think its worth waiting for KDE4. Of course, this talk will attract these people.

Left are beagle hackfest and Clutter talk. Beagle is a must-attend hackfest. (afterall it substitutes stupid google desktop ). And clutter? I have no idea about it.

So this year in Techkriti, we are going to have FOSSKriti as well. FOSSKriti is basically a set of talks, lectures, workshop, hackfest and BoFs about different open source softwares. We have called people from Gnome, KDE, LinuxChix and cool people from Cleartrip (who is supporting this event) to give talks and workshops. Everything has been planned. Checkout the FOSSKriti site to get more information about it.

Basically, there is going to be talks on RoR, KDE4 and LinuxChix. There is going to be a beagle hackfest and kernel hackfest and workshop. And there are some BoFs. In short its going to be awesome. Those who are coming for Software Corner can easily attend these events, we have ensured that there is no major time clash between Software Corner events and FOSSKriti events.

And those who haven’t registered for the event, don’t worry. There is on the spot registration as well. ….

So, here I am, seeing probably 8th movie in Umang’08. This times Umang is surely one of the best Umang in these 4 years. And yeah, I am liking doing live blogging. I just had Pizza from Domino who has a stall just near the auditorium where movies are being shown. Apart from that I am having coffee and popcorns. Surely prices are high. Coffee costed me 10Rs, which usually cost only 5Rs. Pizza prices are 10-20rs higher. Popcorn which should cost only 5Rs. costed me 10Rs. But then you always screw your customers, don’t you.

This time there are 3 screens. 1 in auditorium, where you get to see the wide big screen. 1 is open air theatre, just outside the institute auditorium. And the last one is in newly made outreach auditorium. The outreach one has a really small screen, though the sound quality was good. Open air theatre surely didn’t attract people as even after arranging fire and bed, people didn’t come. Auditorium as usual is awesome.

Today they are showing bourne series in one serious. Right now they are showing Bourne Superemacy. Sound is good. So is video quality. And ofcourse this series is good as well. There were 3-4  non-english and non-hindi movies as well. Audience was like zero till thursday. But from friday onward the auditorium which has a capacity of 2000 students is more than half full. Good, isn’t it.

We also had Mr. Chanakya in opening ceremony, which was surely way too cool. They showed us a episode his new series which is about vedas and upnishadas. The episode was cool. I am now desperately waiting for it. I loved Chanakya.

On a serious note. Its good that Umang uses legal CD to show movies. But they were using illegal songs in intervals. And they even copied VCDs to show movie. (it should really be fine, but its still illegal)