Whatzup lyf.

I was trying to post entries directly from Vim, but the text is not displaying properly. I need to figure out the problem and fix it. It's been pending for some days now. Once it's resolved, it will be so comfortable to post to LiveJournal directly from Vim.

Reviews

I watched The Departed, and I liked it. It's a very good movie with a good story and excellent direction. It might keep you on the edge of your seat while watching. The actors Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and others have done an outstanding job. Well, you're going to hear the 'F' word at least 100 times in that movie, but you won't mind it. The movie is a kind of chase where a rat is implanted on both sides (a gang and the police), and they try to find out who the rat is, while both rats are very clever.

FOSS.IN

Visited FOSS.IN today. Well, I was a bit disappointed as the quality of talks seems to be going down. A few were good—I enjoyed bluesmoon's talk, and the intro by Suparna was okay. But the rest were disappointing!

Atul Chitnis, if I were you, I would just pick quality speakers and fit only as many as the schedule allows (one day or two days). I would not compromise quality in favor of "let's do grand" things. But hey, you're doing a fantastic job (a few quality talks spread over three days) for the minor amount you're collecting from the delegates.

Kudos, keep going, but please check for quality now and then.

Hi Atul,

Yeah, I was bit hard in using that word. But my first day's general feeling was about some talks missing 'quality'. The quality we have come to expect at FOSS with speakers like Alan Cox, Nat, Mugiel and Naba Kumar delivering excellent presentations at previous meets.

I replied to your comment on the second day while watching Christoph Hellwig speaking on Linux Kernel, but the connection failed and the reply did not come up.

So the talks which did not particularly impress me (and many of my friends too):

sUSBix - stick to it !:

Seriously dont know what he was trying to say! He didn't have knowhow on the related area as well.

USB boot of Belenix, nearly covered his whole topic with much ease on the last day.

But, you see sUSBBix was the first talk after the intro by Suparna, got to be careful when audience will be flocking for a good talk at the peak timings.

A FOSS Bridge to Cross the Digital Divide

Man, he did not talk anything related to Digital Divide! Explaining about language, search technology etc etc.

Few the panel discussions at FOSS.IN 2005, with sunil from mahiti.org and others were much better!

Open Source Product Documentation Framework

Another guy beating around the bush. Says OSS guys have all the time in the world discussing on forums, having blogs etc etc, so we should provide them a 'wiki' like thing to write! Excellent thought! But why 2 hours!??

Creating a Flexible Robot Controller using Python

Python is portable, so we are using it. Knowledge!

Well,I know from python.org that it is used in industrial automation and I am not wrong in expecting to know in which processes and how python is plugged into ABB. I didnt get an answer for first 30+ minutes I attended.

These were the few talks on the first day which did not particularly get good reception and might have left a bad impression also.

Few good ones were:

Russell Nelson's on hacking, Philip's share of thoughts in contributing to OSS through his libyahoo experience, Suparnas thought software engineering and it ok ( am not into linux kernel so).

Second and Third day talks were much better ( I choose speakers over the topic).

But there is a long way to go before we can think of anything like what CCC does. Tim Pritlove's talk was amazing!

Thanks,

Senthil

Senthil

Bullshit? Bit hard, aren't you? Just how many of the 23 talks that happened yesterday did you actually attend to judge them?

You are seriously telling me that Christof, Harald, Jamal, Sirtaj, Jayakumar, Andrew, Russel, etc. - who all had house-full talks, and that everyone raved about - were "bullshit"?????

Since you made such a sweeping statement, it would really help your readers if you would actually state which talks you attended (you physically could not have attended more than 6 of the 23 talks, of which 2 you have already tagged as "ok"). It would also help us if we could get more specific comments rather than blanket condemnation.

Thanks.

achitnis