FOSS.IN 2007…..

FOSS.IN is always a fun event. This year it was no different; although I am beginning to feel that even this year the talks were mostly “intro-type” in nature. The good thing about FOSS.IN however is that one gets to meet the whos-who of the FOSS world (KDE world in particular for me).

I could not attend Day 1, but I was there for all of Day 2. Till Adam opened the KDE Project days.

Pradeepto did a very good job of letting the Indian crowd know the ways to get involved in FOSS.IN. He did a great job organizing KDE-PD and is a good leader for KDE.IN.

Kevin then introduced KDE 4 and the new technologies that it brought to the table.

Girish’s talk on stylesheets was just awesome. He is a really good presenter of technical materials.

Piyush did a good job presenting his GSOC work. He really knew the inns and outs of his work. I think we will have more such developers in the coming year.

The last part of the day was interesting (for me) because I got to present GCF to a focussed audience that comprised of a students, KDE developers and Qt developers; people who asked the right kinds of questions after the talk :). Simon and Till (who was on the jury that awarded GCF a prize in the recent QtCentre Programming Contest) seemed to like GCF enough to say that it might be a good idea to present GCF at aKademy 2008. So if all goes right I might be flying to Belgium for presenting GCF to the whole KDE family :).

Today during the KDE hack sessions; Kevin gave me a good demo of Phonon. I think I am going to experiment with it like right now on Linux. Phonon has a similar pipeline structure that we have for VTK classes in VTK Designer, so I am thinking that we should be able to design sound and video rendering scenarios in the same IDE. Whacky idea????? Tell me about it 😉

Holgers talk on OpenEmbedded was interesting. He is really very enthusiastic about his subject. He was infact even demoing Neo1973 yesterday.

Simons presentation on QtWebKit was just wow!. I was expecting that he would show a simple webkit program that would load a HTML page and render it well; but he did something much better. He modified the 40000 chips graphics view example to show a webpage rendered on two graphics views; each transformed in different ways. Anything you do on one webpage reflected in the other. You had to be there to appreciate it.. The other thing I noticed about Simon was the way he handles tough/pointed questions. He is composed, calm and is very professional in handling queries.. Lots to learn from him about presenting core-technology stuff.

I made a lot of new friends this FOSS.IN. Girish, Simon, Holger, Till, Kevin, Barkha, Piyush to name a few. I also reconnected with friends I made from last time: Dr. Tarique Sani, Shyam Mani, Kushal, Karthik Mistry (which reminds me; I have to send him links about VTK Designer) and many more. Its always nice to meet these people. Ah.. before I forget some more pics from the event and the party thrown by Mozilla.

My friend Vasudha (a die-hard Qt fan) had also come to FOSS.IN this year. This was her first time in the event; and she enjoyed it a lot.

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