Open-Source

foss.in/2009. Nimhans Convention Center, Bangalore, Dec. 1-5, 2009. Yep, a month ago (well, atleast it’s better than a year ago). I attended my first foss.in in 2007, and it seriously changed my life. I can’t say quite the same for this edition, but it was interesting. The overwhelming focus of this year’s foss.in was open hardware - something I’m really close to. The best talk I attended without a doubt goes to Harald Welte; he spoke on how people (including himself) had reverse engineered RFIDs, and remarkably GSM, and exposed how flawed it was. Harald has this near holy modesty about him, but good god does he know his stuff. Seriously, Harald ist Gott. ...

IIT Madras hosted it’s second hackfest last weekend, during it’s annual techfest, Shaastra. The hackfest was phenomenally successful, with 6 projects running concurrently producing about 7-8 patches in total. Within our second instalment itself, we’ve probably established ourselves as the most productive student-run hackfest in India, something we are extremely proud of 1. The hackfest is of course something that is very dear to me, and it was really heartening to see it bloom like it did. A review of what happened last year can be found here. ...

I closed some big bad bugs yesterday, and managed to get a whole workflow (open a bunch of files, edit, save, close) working without any glitchy-ness. Most of the time. And while I’m no where near the quality required to ship this plugin, it feels great all the same. A phenomenally boring Youtube screencast. There’s a very apparent bug in the video; it doesn’t change pages when the option is document is chosen from the Documents menu. I’ve already fixed it. If you liked this plugin, well, unfortunately you’ll have to wait a while. ...

I’ve been making some progress on my Anjuta-Vim Integration project, infact, I even have screenshots :-) 1. But that’s very deceptive, notice the (null) ((null)) on the window title. Essentially, I’ve written an AnjutaPlugin that implements the necessary interfaces to “open files”. Currently all my interface implementation functions are returning NULL’s or 0’s (which can cause unpredictable segfaults and memdumps), and that brings me to the real challenge of my GSoC project. ...

My college, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, holds it’s annual techfest, Shaastra, every October. This year, our LUG is pushing for a hackathon to accompany a small FOSS conference (that we’re trying to make big). This will the first time any of us are trying something like this out, and I’d really appreciate any ideas, etc. anyone can give either on how to conduct it, or on some hackable projects. The attending audience will probably largely consist of hobbyist programmers who have heard of the concept of FOSS before, but have never actually worked on a project. There may be one or two experienced veterans also. ...

The list of selected applicants for GSoC 2008 is out! And I’m on that list (big grin here). Honestly, I lack the ability to express my nearly orgasmic joy. It only happens to be my birthday today as well, so this is like the best birthday present eva. Um, a hi-5 anyone? For those of you who aren’t familiar with what GSoC is all about, it’s an awesome program conducted by Google to promote open source development. A lot of open source projects register mentors with Google, after which students start applying for these mentoring organisations. This year, the mentoring organisation list was pretty diverse. Students can either implement some of the ideas proposed by the organization, or propose some ideas of their own (like I did). The mentors go through applications, deciding what’s best for their project, and checking to see if the applicant is capable of pulling it off. If selected, the student spends his summer directly interacting with the project. Google steps in only as a mediating body, and of course to pay the cash. ‘Course they’re responsible for putting this all together. Kudos to them. ...