LB diary - Day 1 & 2
We reached on Tue at 11 pm. Unforunately we had missed the Infosys
visit and the interaction with all the hackers elite. When we reached
the hotel, Abhay had not yet reached. He was scheduled to check in on
Wednesday morning. On the list of people who I knew was Guntapalli
Karunakar. I decided to pay him a visit at around 11:30 in the
night. I knew that there was no way he would be sleeping. He hangs
around on IRC till late night usually. Karunakar was working on his
presentation when we barged in on him. He was put up with a fellow
called Gopal who works in Wipro, Hyderabad. Over three days I have
come to greatly respect this fellow.
That was pretty much it for Tuesday.
Wednesday started with Abhay knocking on our door when we were getting
ready. The person he was supposed to share his room with was having
his bath. When I opened the door, he said 'Hi'. I replied with a 'Hi',
but I had no idea who I was talking to. I had never seen Abhay in my
life before. He introduced himself and then there handshakes all
around. Eventually he managed to get inside his room and got ready for
the bus which showed up at 8:15 to take us to the conference
venue. The bus was spacious and the seats were really
comfortable. Abhay and I decided to postpone planning and practising
our talk to the next day.
We reached the venue, registered as speakers and were looking around
for what to do next when I spotted Mahendra. Not much change in him
from the time I saw him a year ago.
He took us inside (we had to wait for Homyar to get registereed as a
delegate) and handed over the InfyLUG laptop to us. Its an amazing
laptop really, with a battery life of 5 minutes. While the others were
runninng about to get the wireless network working, we were running
around searching for a power point (pun not intended).
Then there was the inauguration ceremony. Pretty cool it was, with the
text2wave program being put to good effect. There was no chief guest
for the inauguration. Representatives of different LUGs were supposed
to inaugurate the event. So I ended up going on stage as a
representative of PLUG.
The first set of talks were by Andrew Cowie (ex-head of Linux
Australia and currently on the board of directors) and Herald Welte
(guru in networking and current maintainer of netfilter and iptables
in the linux kernel). I've seen people type fast but this guy types in
units of lines, not characters.
After his talk I went and had a word with him regarding InfyLUG and
related things. He had some background since he had been on a visit to
Infosys and the lab with the others on Tuesday.
I later had the chance to speak and interact with all the speakers and
one thing that struck me most was that basically all these were really
nice people and always ready to help you out. They have a good sense
of humour too and they are nice people to have around and hang out
with. Surprisingly, most of my conversations with these people were on
non-technical topics.
Meanwhile, Gopal had managed to successfully port the .GNU framework
(the open source equivalent of .NET) to the Simputer. Encore were one
of the sponsors and they were giving away SDK and Simulator CDs. Gopal
had a bet with Atul Chitnis on IRC before the conference that he could
port the .GNU framework to the Simputer. What was at stake was a cup of
coffee. He managed to port it in a day. Last I knew of, Atul still
hadn't given him a coffee.
Another example of hackerdom came from Herald Welte the night before
the conference. The problem was the computers sponsored for the event
did not have a wi-fi driver that worked correctly. And the organisers
wanted to have a wireless network at the venue. Herald was staying at
Atul's house and he said he would have a go at it. The problem was
that the specifications of the hardware involved were not
disclosed. After everyone went to sleep at 2 am, Herald ripped open
the cover, pulled out the card and searched for the various chip
numbers on the net and what others had done with other hardware that
used these chips. So he got an idea of how the device must be working
(mind you, he still did not have the exact specifications, it was all
guesswork). He then proceeded to modify the existing driver.
In the morning he greeted Atul with a smile and said "Hi, here is your
driver ... and it works". Hacker numero uno!
I don't remember the details of all the talks I attended, but there
was this discussion session on promoting open source software in India
and a roadmap was defined. All the details should be put up at the LB
site shortly.
For dinner, all of us speakers were taken to a cross betwewen a
resteraunt and a bar. What matters most is that the food was
good. After dinner some of us (Arvind, Gopal, Homyar and Karunakar)
went for a walk in search of a net-cafe. In spite of Harald's heroics
the earlier day, the organisers had had tough time with the ISPs to
get them to get internet connectivity to IISC. So we were deperately
starved for bandwidth and some screenshots that I wanted to
incorporate in my presentation were in my GMail mailbox. So after a
long walk, we found a net cafe. Just below it was something that
looked like a cafe, where we had coffee. After reaching the hotel, I
worked on my presentation till 2 am (which I would rue later on) and
slept.
That, pretty much was Wednesday.
visit and the interaction with all the hackers elite. When we reached
the hotel, Abhay had not yet reached. He was scheduled to check in on
Wednesday morning. On the list of people who I knew was Guntapalli
Karunakar. I decided to pay him a visit at around 11:30 in the
night. I knew that there was no way he would be sleeping. He hangs
around on IRC till late night usually. Karunakar was working on his
presentation when we barged in on him. He was put up with a fellow
called Gopal who works in Wipro, Hyderabad. Over three days I have
come to greatly respect this fellow.
That was pretty much it for Tuesday.
Wednesday started with Abhay knocking on our door when we were getting
ready. The person he was supposed to share his room with was having
his bath. When I opened the door, he said 'Hi'. I replied with a 'Hi',
but I had no idea who I was talking to. I had never seen Abhay in my
life before. He introduced himself and then there handshakes all
around. Eventually he managed to get inside his room and got ready for
the bus which showed up at 8:15 to take us to the conference
venue. The bus was spacious and the seats were really
comfortable. Abhay and I decided to postpone planning and practising
our talk to the next day.
We reached the venue, registered as speakers and were looking around
for what to do next when I spotted Mahendra. Not much change in him
from the time I saw him a year ago.
He took us inside (we had to wait for Homyar to get registereed as a
delegate) and handed over the InfyLUG laptop to us. Its an amazing
laptop really, with a battery life of 5 minutes. While the others were
runninng about to get the wireless network working, we were running
around searching for a power point (pun not intended).
Then there was the inauguration ceremony. Pretty cool it was, with the
text2wave program being put to good effect. There was no chief guest
for the inauguration. Representatives of different LUGs were supposed
to inaugurate the event. So I ended up going on stage as a
representative of PLUG.
The first set of talks were by Andrew Cowie (ex-head of Linux
Australia and currently on the board of directors) and Herald Welte
(guru in networking and current maintainer of netfilter and iptables
in the linux kernel). I've seen people type fast but this guy types in
units of lines, not characters.
After his talk I went and had a word with him regarding InfyLUG and
related things. He had some background since he had been on a visit to
Infosys and the lab with the others on Tuesday.
I later had the chance to speak and interact with all the speakers and
one thing that struck me most was that basically all these were really
nice people and always ready to help you out. They have a good sense
of humour too and they are nice people to have around and hang out
with. Surprisingly, most of my conversations with these people were on
non-technical topics.
Meanwhile, Gopal had managed to successfully port the .GNU framework
(the open source equivalent of .NET) to the Simputer. Encore were one
of the sponsors and they were giving away SDK and Simulator CDs. Gopal
had a bet with Atul Chitnis on IRC before the conference that he could
port the .GNU framework to the Simputer. What was at stake was a cup of
coffee. He managed to port it in a day. Last I knew of, Atul still
hadn't given him a coffee.
Another example of hackerdom came from Herald Welte the night before
the conference. The problem was the computers sponsored for the event
did not have a wi-fi driver that worked correctly. And the organisers
wanted to have a wireless network at the venue. Herald was staying at
Atul's house and he said he would have a go at it. The problem was
that the specifications of the hardware involved were not
disclosed. After everyone went to sleep at 2 am, Herald ripped open
the cover, pulled out the card and searched for the various chip
numbers on the net and what others had done with other hardware that
used these chips. So he got an idea of how the device must be working
(mind you, he still did not have the exact specifications, it was all
guesswork). He then proceeded to modify the existing driver.
In the morning he greeted Atul with a smile and said "Hi, here is your
driver ... and it works". Hacker numero uno!
I don't remember the details of all the talks I attended, but there
was this discussion session on promoting open source software in India
and a roadmap was defined. All the details should be put up at the LB
site shortly.
For dinner, all of us speakers were taken to a cross betwewen a
resteraunt and a bar. What matters most is that the food was
good. After dinner some of us (Arvind, Gopal, Homyar and Karunakar)
went for a walk in search of a net-cafe. In spite of Harald's heroics
the earlier day, the organisers had had tough time with the ISPs to
get them to get internet connectivity to IISC. So we were deperately
starved for bandwidth and some screenshots that I wanted to
incorporate in my presentation were in my GMail mailbox. So after a
long walk, we found a net cafe. Just below it was something that
looked like a cafe, where we had coffee. After reaching the hotel, I
worked on my presentation till 2 am (which I would rue later on) and
slept.
That, pretty much was Wednesday.
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