As a developer, I have to say that FOSS.IN/08 is possibly the most productive conference I’ve been to until now! In just 5 days, I’ve got more things done than I have in the last 5 months

Let’s start with the Beacon workout: Nandeep joined us via VoIP and we got started almost immediately, thanks to the dynamic nature and small size of our project – we didn’t have any infrastructural trouble as a few other C/C++ projects with huge codebases and complex build systems did. We had a list of 6 tasks in mind, and we managed to complete 3 of them. Salil Kothadia got started with writing a PDO data backend, and promptly submitted the patch to us next day. Thanks Salil, hope you continue to contribute to the development of Beacon (thereby increasing the development team size by 25%)!

I also attended Philip’s workout on porting HTML::Template to Javascript. As mentioned on the Wiki page, we mostly worked on the design during the first half or so, and then moved on to writing a skeleton for the whole framework. I think this is an extremely interesting project, and am very happy to be associated with its birth. Hope we can continue the momentum and work until it is finished.

Perhaps the biggest take-away from the conference for me was the ability to give a lightning talk about Glendix, with several kernel hackers present in the audience. Christoph then kindly offered to review some of the patches during the workout. Even the possibility of Plan 9 binary emulation being considered for inclusion into the main kernel tree is amazing, let alone the fact that I got the guidance of an experienced kernel hacker for a good 2 hours! I think the effort was largely successful – I now have a better idea of what I need to do in order to get a kernel patch in order, and also got a few hints as to how I can implement the missing bits.

My primary focus at the conference was to give a talk on Mozilla Labs and Innovation. I think I managed to stir up a decent amount of interest in the various Labs initiatives. I covered the different ways in which members of the community can contribute, specifically focussing on Weave, Ubiquity and the Concept Series. We even covered how easy it is to actually write an Ubiquity command. I now look forward to increased participation by the Indian Mozilla community in Labs projects. Don’t forget to thank Mary for all the goodies!

All this, apart from regular conference happenings like catching up with old friends, making new ones and free swag (great mugs and t-shirts this time around) makes FOSS.IN/08 one of the most successful conferences I’ve been to so far! I can’t wait for the 2009 edition

Glendix has been making the rounds on the web lately, with coverage from OSNews, Reddit, and even a Russian site, Linux.org.ru. It’s really motivating to see some buzz around the project, giving me the extra boost needed to push the completion of a usable release!

Some of the major obstacles that have to be crossed before making a beta-quality release are the completion of critical synthetic filesystems – especially /net and /draw. We also have to work out the kinks with per-process namespaces and union mounts. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Rio running as a WM before an official release; if not, Plan9Port’s Rio and WMII are good candidates.

The biggest criticism of Glendix seems to be the reasoning that Plan9 user-space tools are somehow superior to their GNU counterparts, and several people have asked us to substantiate our claims. At this point, however, I don’t think that it is really important, or even relevant. Even if Plan9 user-space tools aren’t somehow better – I think it is generally a refreshing idea to see Linux combined with a user-space other than GNU.

We’re at FOSS.IN this year, where a large number of kernel developers have gathered; and I hope to get some of their valuable input on the problems Glendix currently faces, and maybe even write some code to solve them

Thanks for all the community support and critical comments, they are all very vital feedback for the project and are much appreciated!

Just dicovered Typealyzer via Tejas. This post makes a nice successor to the previous one: Typealyzer analyzes a blog and tries to predict your Myers-Briggs type based on it. My result was ESTP (The Doer) as opposed to INTP (The Thinker) returned by other traditional personality tests (such as 41 Questions, covered in the previous post).

It’s interesting to note that while I’m an “introvert” in real-life, my blog posts are generally “extrovert” in nature. Though I wonder what an introvert blog looks like – most people maintain a blog because they want to express themselves, no? Also, I’m apparently more Sensing than iNtuitive in my writing, as opposed to real life. The other two characteristics: Thinking and Perception remain the same.

I’m usually not a big fan of personality tests, especially the online ones, but this one was scarily accurate. Or atleast, I’d like to think so

Continuing with my travel spree, I made a trip to Volos, Greece and back for the 3rd International workshop on Plan 9. I was to make short presentation on Glendix, a paper on which was selected for the workshop.

Being a brown single guy in his early twenties, traveling around Europe is not exactly fun. Just saying. I got picked out not once, not twice, but THREE times for “random passport and security checks”. Once in Munich on my way to Volos, once on the streets of Athens, and finally on my way back at the Frankfurt airport. Not that I’m complaning, they were just doing their job; but really, they need to get better at profiling.

Athens is a really nice city, though it reminds me of India: crowded trains, chaotic traffic and sketchy bus stations. I knew most of the Greek symbols, thanks to high school Math courses, but pronouncing them wasn’t easy. Thankfully, the people at the counters in the Airport, Bus and Metro stations knew English. After a 5 hour bus ride, I reached Volos in the wee hours of Thursday. After around 3 hours of sleep and about 30 minutes of slide preparation, I was set for my talk.

Considering I was at a Plan 9 conference, talking about integrating it into Linux, my talk was very well received. Certainly beyond my general expectations: I got some really excellent questions, comments and general observations, and most importantly, a lot of help on the current issues that Glendix faces. All the other talks during the conference were extremely interesting as well, I was particularly fascinated by the concept of “Upperware”, the Inferno port to Nindento DS, and the Mrph morphological analyzer. Do check out the entire conference proceedings.

It was great to finally meet all the Plan 9 and Bell Labs folks in-person, especially: Sape Mullender, Charles Forsyth, Bruce Ellis; not to mention the IRC regulars uriel, quintile, sqweek and fgb!

The return trip was a bit more scenic, thanks to it being afternoon. After spening the night in Athens, I was back in Amsterdam the next day. More adventures followed, but that’s for another blog post.

Nothing like a trip to IWP9 to humble you!

P.S. Cool Glenda goodies for sale at Cafepress

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the past few weeks, starting with the really exciting “Northside Weekend” at the Dutch towns of Tolbert and Groningen. Copious amounts of embarrassing pictures were generated on Facebook: I wouldn’t expect any less from a group of 60 students hanging out over the weekend

Allowing for just enough time to recover, I had to write my final exam for the Parallel Programming course. Having courses compressed into such short time periods can be both and good and bad, I guess I will decide for myself when the results come in!

I left almost immediately after the exam to catch a flight to Barcelona, for EU MozCamp 2008. There was a Labs Session at the Facultat d’informàtica de Barcelona the next day, part of Dan and Aza’s Europe tour. I managed to reach just before the session ended, thanks to me getting lost and then someone pointing me to a different place in the opposite direction. thunder, aza and myself then traversed the excellent Metro system in the city, to catch up with cbeard for lunch. I had my first experience with Tapas, and it wasn’t bad at all – the fact that thunder knows spanish helped a lot. mconnor joined us shortly after. A fabulous dinner later, we were all set for the first day of MozCamp

Most Mozilla events are all about meeting new people and catching up with people you knew already. I made the most of it, it was nice to see faces back from Mountain View, and some new ones. Aza was scheduled for a Labs keynote on the first day, which was pretty good. Unfortunately, he seemed to have contracted food poisoning, or maybe just general exhaustion and insomnia from the whole Labs Europe tour; so they postponed the session on Ubiquity to the next day. David Ascher’s talk was fantastic with some really cool demos, Thunderbird 3 is going to be prodigious! We had a session on Weave that evening, which also went off reasonably well, though the audience seemed more focused on the legal and privacy aspects of the project. Not a bad thing, just not interesting to me – I’d rather think and talk about technical challenges

I had the wonderful opportunity to have dinner with Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. I also met up with Suneel who had just recently joined Mozilla at Mountain View, and we all had a great time! mconnor had to stay awake a little later than the rest of us, to prepare for his talk the next day.

Highlights of Day 2 were mconnor’s talk, 2010 goals discussion and the session on Ubiquity. I also had a brief discussion with Dan on some of my plans for Weave 0.3, it’s going to be awesome! Labs team did a little sightseeing that night, and then caught up with John Lilly, accompanied by his wife, for dinner. A perfect end to an excellent weekend.

Thanks Mozilla Europe, and Barcelona!