I’m off to the beautiful city of Prague, or “Praha” as it is known locally, for the European MozCamp of 2009. Memories from the MozCamp last year are still fresh, and I’m definitely looking forward to this one!

On Friday, we’re going to be hosting a Labs Hackathon on Jetpack. This is your chance to get to know more about the framework that’s so easy to use that your mom could write an extension with it. Maybe not your Grandma though, you do need to know a bit of Javascript The hack session will last as long into the night as needed for you folks to come up with amazing ideas for Jetpacks and implement them. Drew Willcoxon from the Firefox team and I will be on hand all day to help you, so feel free to come and poke us. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that there’s Free Pizza involved.

On Saturday, I’ll be giving a talk on Weave. With 0.7 just released, we’ll be taking a look at our current state, what’s in store for the future, and maybe a few cool demos. We’re also especially interested in engaging with addon developers to see what Weave can do to make it easier for them to add sync functionality to their addons.

Be there!

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!

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!

Atul recently posted an update on why FOSS.IN/08 is going to be a lot different than previous incarnations. This has already caused a bit of a stir in the both the Indian and International FOSS communities, just going to chip in with a few thoughts.

The goal of the conference seems to be encouraging Indians to create innovative pieces of free and open source software, rather than just contributing tiny bits by doing jobs “no one else wants to do”; read packaging for distros and localization. First off, that is just downright insulting to everyone who has being helping out in those areas so far – undoing months of evangelism in just one sentence. I understand that FOSS.IN isn’t about evangelism and philosophy, but I think it is a bit much to actively undo work that others have been doing. FOSS.IN is India’s largest conference on free and open source software that fair amount of people look upto – a statement like that from the team runs the risk of pushing potential localizers away – harming the FOSS ecosystem rather than helping it. I am sure that’s not the intention of the team, but “low-hanging fruit” is a poor choice of words at best. It’s fine to change the focus of the conference, but it’s possible to have done that without labeling other aspects of FOSS that you don’t want your conference to be about.

The second thing that puzzles me is the choice of putting the “spotlight on Indian contributors”. Given the goal of encouraging more Indians to make significant contributions to FOSS, I don’t see how eliminating international speakers helps. FOSS.IN, being hosted in Bangalore, is going to attract only Indians as delegates, why does it matter if the speakers are Indian or not? I am sure delegates at the conference care more about what the speaker is talking about rather that his/her nationality. In fact, nationality isn’t even relevant to FOSS in any manner. If the number of talks by Indians was seriously low last year, I don’t forsee much change this year either – simply because there are more contributors who are not Indian – a “problem” that FOSS.IN wants to “fix”; but again, how does selecting fewer talks help achieve that? Also, if there are going to be fewer foriegners at the event, why bother organizing “light Indian entertainment”?

Lastly, I see FOSS.IN is drastically narrowing down on its target audience. In fact, I think there is nobody who falls under the category of the ideal participant in FOSS.IN/08. The conference is not for the “newbies”, it’s not for those who wish to help with localization, but rather for those who already possess the technical skills to contribute “significantly” to FOSS. Now, if they bothered to register for FOSS.IN as a delegate, they obviously know what open source is about and have initiative. Given all these conditions, I am sure they already have everything they need to start contributing, why do they need to attend the conference?

In the end, is FOSS.IN/08 just a giant hackathon? Where people just sit down and write code? You don’t need an elaborate 5 day “conference” hosted in Bangalore to do that.

</rant>

I do look forward to the results of this massive “experiment”

Time for a quick update on what I’ve been upto this week…

Let’s start with the Intern BBQ – I guess the highlight of the event was Schrep almost being thrown into the pool, I think David sums it up quite nicely. I left the same night for L.A. – the primary item on my agenda was to attend Russell Peters and Friends at the Grove of Anaheim. The show was great, he didn’t repeat any of his old jokes and we had 3 other comics (as Russell called them) – all of them kept us laughing for over 2 hours.

I spent all of Sunday at Universal Studios, Hollywood – which was also great fun. The studio tour, ‘Water World’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ attractions were especially worth it. I caught a Greyhound back to San Jose and headed straight to work.

Week 10 was spent in finishing up the OAuth implementation for Weave – both server-side and client-side. I also wrote a PHP library to access a user’s Bookmarks and open Tabs via OAuth. We had a small demo at the third edition of Labs Night (which was held on Thursday, Jono gives a more detailed account). As we get closer to unrolling both the Weave web client and the OAuth API, I’m looking to forward to some great mashups from third party developers

Maria, Rob, Paul and I spent saturday touring the vineyards and hills of Santa Cruz…

Now, we have a plane to catch in about 7 hours for what is poised to be a climax of gargantuan proportions for my summer. Keep track of what’s going on at Whistler at Summitr. Needless to say, I’m super-excited!

Get the story

Should’ve known something like this was coming, given the recent spike in M$ spending on FOSS conferences.

What really caught my eye is that Mike Schroepfer of Mozilla is on the list of people Sam Ramji wants to thank

Day 3: The first day of the main conference. We thought we were running late (left home only at 09:50 after getting our Gentoo T-Shirts on) but the inauguration ceremony started half-hour late (as usual!) so we were able to catch the whole action. After FOSS.IN/2007 was kicked off by Atul & Kishore, Naba Kumar came up to give the keynote on Anjuta DevStudio. I didn’t know the origin of the name Anjuta earlier, but it was certainly fascinating

I had my talk on contributing to Gentoo right after the keynote, and we started at 11:30 on the dot (the schedules in other rooms were on-time). Gora gave an excellent introduction, and I began speaking to a somewhat-filled room about the different entry points to Gentoo development. The audience were really interactive and the questions were brilliant – this is something that I really liked about this years edition of FOSS.IN. There was a lot more interest in Gentoo than I had originally anticipated and it was nice to see our stall really crowded immediately after the talk. Hopefully, we’ve brain-washed atleast two-dozen people into using Gentoo :). The remainder of the day was spent talking to people who approached our stall – it got a bit monotonous though, answering the same question “Why is Gentoo different?” over and over again. We’ve decided to print out an FAQ poster and put it up to make things a little more easier for us

I had my third talk on Plan 9 from Bell Labs scheduled in the evening, right beside some really interesting stuff including the talk on PulseAudio and the lightning talk session. Again, I really didn’t expect much of a crowd for my talk, but I was happily mistaken. The room was not only full, but there were also people seated on the stairs and near the door! The talk went off really well, and I think it was *the* best talk I’ve delivered so far. The crowd was really smart and it was fun to interact with such an audience.We’ve planned to have a small Mozilla hack-a-thon today, let’s see how that goes. Besides that I’ve planned to attend a few other interesting talks. Looking forward to keeping the pace up, I’ll catch you all tomorrow!

We reached a little late for Day 2, because there were no talks in particular that we had wanted to attend. After reaching the venue at around 11:00, the first thing we did was to distribute the Gentoo t-shirts so folks could wear them today (the t-shirt needs one wash before wear). Shyam (fox2mike) had brought the Gentoo banner so we set that up in the stall. G0SUB and myself then attended pradeepto’s talk on setting up a KDE development environment. This was followed by an amazing demonstration of dtrace by the one and only GMan (Glynn Foster from Sun/GNOME). dtrace is really powerful, although I keep hearing about it, yesterday was the first time I actually understood how useful it is. After lunch, I attended Debarshi’s talk on Opyum, his summer of code project for this year. Also got to meet a bunch of other SoCers and we’ve all planned a SoC BoF along with a few mentors who are also present at the event.

Then we got busy distributing invites for the Mozilla party, and hung out with the Mozilla gang until it was time to leave. The party was at Opus which was a nice place with good (loud) music :). The karaoke was a big hit. After meeting a lot of people and having some good discussion, I decided to call it a day (I had two talks to prepare for!).Day 3 begins in a few hours – both my talks are today and we’re going to kick off the Gentoo stall, so I’m really excited. See you tomorrow with another update!