Someone who found my code interesting, can use it as a launchpad and take it ahead!
Showing posts with label opensource. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opensource. Show all posts
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Why you should be at conf.kde.in
conf.kde.in is happening in Bangalore from 9th-13th March. This is a golden opportunity for students to have fun and learn some really interesting things that no college or class can teach. It is also a chance to form friendships that last forever.
If you don’t like long posts: here is the gist.
- Short term benefits – a great time and a cool t-shirt.
- Long term benefits – create something awesome, lots of friends and an impressive CV that recruiters will notice.
Remember that feeling you had the first time you made a paper boat all by yourself and set it on the water? Or the time when you sang really well on stage and a hundred people gave you a standing ovation? With KDE, its possible to create beauty everyday!
When I first started using Linux in 2004, KDE 3.2 was an eye-opener about what truly functional and powerful computing could be. It was liberating. But the real magic of KDE is in its people, highly talented, motivated and very warm individuals with a lot of free hugs. So come and join the community. You don’t have to be a top-grade programmer, a really great designer or a Indian language expert to enter. At KDE we welcome everybody who has the passion to improve the computing experience for millions of people.
If you are a programmer, at conf.kde.in you have a chance to take away intimate knowledge about working with technologies like Qt, a cross-platform library which allows you to create high-quality applications on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Symbian and even Android. With so much web and social and information, you might want to make use of KDE’s excellent Nepomuk framework to create semantically aware apps that can look at things like humans. Or the lab sessions will have you get started with submitting bug fixes for KDE in no time.
If drawing and painting is your forte, we have sessions to get you contributing your skills to open source applications and improving the KDE look and feel. You could create the next UI paradigm and dominate the world! :)
A billion people are waiting to use computers, and one of the things stopping them from having cheap, affordable machines is the lack of English literacy. So if you know more than one language, you could jump in and translate applications to Indian languages and bring a smile to some kid, and make his future!
Don’t think that as a student you lack the qualifications to attend. A HUGE chunk of KDE is made of students, with even teenage contributors! I myself am just a 3rd year undergraduate. We encourage students through programs like Google Summer of Code, Season of KDE and Google Code-In for high-school students. conf.kde.in is here to guide you even if you have never programmed before. We have excellent talks for all levels, by notable members of the KDE community. We also have interactive lab sessions where you will get to hack and explore more code than you will ever do in your college courses :P
Make sure you drag along your teachers too. They can be introduced to the educational tools that make KDE such a great platform to learn new things on. Whether its astronomy or jigsaw puzzles or Ph. D. level computer courses, KDE has applications for them to make their teaching more tangible!
Student passes are Rs. 500 (for all 3 days, including lunch), teachers can register for Rs. 700. For others its Rs. 900. Register online before 25th February to attend conf.kde.in. Although you can register after that, even on the spot at the day of the conference, it will be more expensive later (Students: Rs. 700, Teachers: Rs. 900, Normal: Rs. 1200). Remember to enter discount codes to get a discount, and get your college ID card to the event.
- Student discount: KDEIN_DIS_STU
- Teacher discount: KDEIN_DIS_TCR
If you need a letter to get permission from your college, we can arrange that.
PS. If you can get a laptop with Linux on it to conf.kde.in, you can have twice the fun :)
Monday, December 20, 2010
foss.in 2010
The 10th and sadly last foss.in took place this week in Bangalore. I was there for all three days of the conference and it was great. This time around we were 6 students from my college. In addition, at the last minute a lot of KDE developers did turn up, including Vishesh Handa, Pradeepto, Abhishek and Sujith.
Danese Cooper’s opening talk about the architecture of Wikipedia was inspiring. That one of the top 5 websites in the world, is powered by just 450 servers and 60 people is an inspiring tale of open source skill and passion. Danese was here to consider a possible server location in India to serve Asia. Wikimedia was also kind enough to give t-shirts as part of the foss.in delegate kit. The calendar in the delegate kit also has stunning wildlife photography.
foss.in lunches are always delicious so that came before any talk. With Nokia being one of the sponsors, Meego was being pushed heavily with 2 days of talks and workshops. Nokia is already pushing QML as a… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
So yes, on day 1, Aditya Bhatt had a talk on libface which by the way, will identify anything as a face. Rahul Sundaram’s talk about Fedora’s early mistakes was good learning for other FOSS projects. But I was distracted by this time by the announcement that Nokia was giving away two or three N900s!
To those who don’t know, the N900 is a hand held computer powered by Maemo, with complete root access and lots of developer friendly features. At the same time it gives any smart-phone the run for its money. Nokia has been agressively pushing the N900 to developers so that the Meego platform can start getting application support. Since Qt applications run directly on Meego, KDE developers are a particularly strong N900 market. Now it was my chance to get one! The catch was to make a QML/Qt based program and submit it on the third day of the conference.
I’ve had QML in my sights for quite some time, but never took out the time to actually try it out. Here was an opportunity. So I made Solarwolf in pure QML and JavaScript. QML’s state concept is very interesting and makes sense if you’ve read Computation and State-machines. Of course there are certain areas where it was much easier to write imperative code in JS. The code itself was written sprint style and is not the neatest or most refactored. What QML really needs is something similar to inheritance so that certain common properties (for example all Sprites have movement deltas) can be factored out. In addition it is odd that all Qt properties and classes have not been exposed in QML’s scripting environment. Things like QRect::intersects() would have been very useful.
Day 2 had Abhishek Patil’s talk about scripting Kate which was insightful and shows what an awesome piece of software Kate is. Anand Mitra’s talk about ZFS was the best technical talk in my two years at foss.in. He clearly had a good understanding of ZFS (seeing that I had nothing) and made everyone aware of the challenges of porting such core programs like filesystems. Leveraging the Git Object Store by Ramkumar Ramachandra was a good way to know how dumb git is. After that I skipped all the talks to hack on Solarwolf, so I’m not aware of the others. Fahrenheit did do a good show however.
By that night my game was pretty much done, it was working on Dinesh’s N900 and so with a bit of polish the next morning I was ready for submission. But with that, and talking to a few people about various things I missed all the talks, including CouchDB and QtWebkit’s graphics layer.
Aanjhan Ranganathan’s “A Hacker’s Apology” was a brilliant end to the final foss.in. The point about preaching Hacker Culture, and not politics or philosophy is the most important thing today. Encouraging everyone in the world to be curious about their surroundings and always asking why should be encouraged, rather than fighting about whether its Linux or GNU/Linux :). The slides aren’t up yet, but everyone should see them when they are available.
Following some moments of nostalgia by Atul Chitnis, The Raghu Dixit Project brought the house down with their superb music!
I won!
That’s right. I have a brand new N900. With a high-quality Bluetooth headset too. This chronologically goes in on the last day at around 5:00 pm, but I thought it deserved a seperate section. It’s a great phone except for the lack of STK support. Some of the little UI touches and shortcuts are especially heartening. They lend true geekiness to the phone. The camera is more than good enough for me, it plays virtually everything I throw at it, and it has inbuilt UPnP support! Now its time to play Angry Birds.
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