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!

Ok, this post is way too late – but in my defense, I’ve probably never been this busy! I guess this is a good time to post, as today marks the 3rd anniversary of my blog. Wow, 3 years just flew by. As I go through some of my older posts, I can see how I’ve changed so much. I guess it’s useful to have a blog, some way or the other.

2008 was simply a phenomenal year for me: Glendix was born, I graduated from college, had an amazing summer at Mozilla, joined a masters programme at Amsterdam, and visited 9 countries. Phew

After winding up my only exam for the semester, a couple of friends and me headed out to explore Europe during the winter vacations. The experience was extremely overwhelming. Instead of writing anything, I will let some pictures do the talking. We visited 5 cities in total: Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg and Paris. Christmas was spent ice-skating on a nice, snowy night in Munich; New Years eve at the Eiffel tower. I wish I could say there were great fireworks, but I would be lying

After returning to Amsterdam I was greeted with deadlines for programming assignments, so I spent most of the month writing a lot of code. Now, February has come,  it’s a new semester, bringing a whole new wave of course load (taking 6 subjects at the same time!). I’m seriously considering cutting down on a whole lot of extra activity and focus just on the essentials: College, Mozilla and Glendix (in that order). Maybe it is time for me to retire from all the other FOSS projects, I just don’t have the luxury of time I had as an undergraduate student any more…

In other news, I am now pretty good at cooking a basic meal: rice and dal. I’ve also made Ghee from butter with acceptable results twice until now, and the latest attempt even resulted in some delicious ‘nei kasandu‘, a typical tamilian snack made from the remnants of the ghee-making. Oh, and I’ve also picked up a little Dutch; basic phrases like ‘Hello’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Pardon me’, ‘I don’t understand dutch very well’, and ‘See you later’.

I can’t even begin to imagine what 2009 has in store for me, so I’m not going to bother. Here’s to a great year 11 months ahead!

P.S. You may have noticed I’ve added links to archives of both technical and non-technical blog posts on the sidebar. This should help all my non-geek readers sift through to the posts where I don’t talk about programming or technology (for the most part, at least!)

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!

After a (relatively) short flight, I landed at the Amsterdam Schiphol airport the day before yesterday. I was greeted by a student from the ESN-VUNiverse, who explained the excellent public transportation system of Amsterdam while making the trip back. Getting to Uilenstede (a student housing community in Amstelveen, where I have a room) was a breeze, we reached in just around half-an-hour.

The first thing I noticed about Amsterdam is how much like a city it doesn’t look. It looks more like a quaint little town – there are no huge skyscrapers or crowded streets – overall very pleasing to the eye. The weather is pleasant, but mostly rain and clouds – haven’t seen much sunshine since I got here

We arrived at my ‘corridor’, protected by a door of its own. Every corridor has 12 dutch students and 2 international students, sharing a common kitchen. I proceeded to my ‘unit’, which is basically my room – it is a lot bigger and cleaner than my previous room at MNIT.

Internet and Cable were ready to go from the very first day. I’m loving this place

Yesterday, we had the ‘Word of Welcome’. I wasted no time in buying a bicycle, the standard transport vehicle in Amsterdam, so my trip to the university was a quick 10 minute ride. Most of the streets in Amsterdam have their own dedicated bicycle paths, complete with their own traffic lights. Bicycle theft, however, is also very common; so common in fact, that some people call it the ‘national sport’!

Immediately after lunch, we had the introduction programme at the faculty of sciences where we got upto speed with all the practical stuff that needs to be done (opening a bank account, registration with the municipality and so on). Then, we got a tour of the faculty: very very impressive! In the evening, we had a small gathering with the staff for drinks: I finally met Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum and Prof. Maarten van Steen

Another thing I love about Amsterdam is that everyone speaks excellent English, and they’re not shy of showing off their bilingual skills. That makes it a lot easier for foriegners like us to settle down quickly. I am also trying to learn a few Dutch words though. I’m pretty sure I am going to have a fantastic time for the next two years: the course, the staff, the city, and the people are all top-class.

Classes start on September 1; but meanwhile, ESN-VUniverse has organized a few events that I’ll be attending. This weekend, we are touring Amsterdam, doing a canal cruise, some waterbiking and cycling. See you next post!

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!

The better part of my 4th week was spent in bed trying to recover from a 104.1 body temperature. Let’s back up a bit…

Some (well, most) of the interns decided to visit the Haight Ashbury Street Fair at San Francisco on the Sunday of my 3rd weekend in the states. It was a great idea in general, because I hadn’t been to “the city” yet and the fair looked like a fun place to be. After a pleasant 45 minute drive, we were in the city looking for parking, and with a little help from j4cbo’s phone we were ready to hit the fair.

The road had a stage for bands at either end, with a line of shops on either side of the street in the middle. It was what a typical fair would look like, tons and tons of people walking around, people advertising for a product, politician or right, people selling good food and drink, and lots of generally good shops selling everything from hats and sunglasses to sweatshirts and “medical marijuana”. I took my fair share of food, starting with small bits of popcorn from a HUGE bag someone decided to buy, finishing off with a double chocolate chip brownie sundae at the local Ben and Jerry’s. San Francisco was windy at the time, and I was glad I brought my Jacket along. We started winding up at around 5, and were back at the apartments by 7 after a stop at La Bamba’s for mexican dinner.

Somewhere along the whole trip, I caught a virus. Gah, I wonder what it could have been.

I started feeling a little off almost immediately but I shrugged it off as tiredness from the trip. I also managed to go to work on Monday and Tuesday, though I could feel my efficiency levels at a real low. I did manage to finish writing the server API for Weave, however, I think I could have done more if I were in a normal state.

Wednesday morning, I just couldn’t muster enough energy to walk after getting out of the shower, so I decided to stay in. The fever got worse through the day, and on Thursday morning I made an appointment with a doctor. He said it was a general case of viral fever, and that it would go away in a week, regardless of whether I would take medicines or not (Go immune system, Go!). But he prescribed some anyway, they were painkillers and some antibiotics, to make life a little easier in the coming days. (Note to Self: Medical care is expensive in the US! My travel insurance wouldn’t cover a ‘minor illness’ like fever. Next time, I should make sure to get an insurance that does cover these ‘minor illnesses’).

Anyway, as Sunday approached I got a lot better and was back to normal for work on Monday. Truly, there is always light at the end of the tunnel, because this week has been one of the most awesome ones so far. More on that in another post!

The 18th of May consisted of 30 hours for me. No, the earth isn’t rotating slower than usual, I’ve just been flying against it’s direction for the whole of today. I flew over 12 countries (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland/Denmark, Canada and finally the US); and 10 states in the US (New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and finally California) in the last 30 hours. Somehow, I don’t feel all that “jet-lagged”, perhaps because my routine at home was upside-down anyway!

Armen and Gary were kind enough to pick me up at the airport, despite the late hour. I’ve reached Mountain View, and will be crashing at their apartment for tonight because it’s too late to check-in. Tomorrow is my first day at Mozilla, which is really exciting, but it also means that I better go to sleep now.

This blog post is courtesy of Google’s free Wifi service for Mountain View

My Goa trip was simply fantabulous. Apart from the fact that Goa is a great place for a vacation, I was accompanied by 7 of my college friends which made the trip one that I will cherish for a long time to come.We left Bangalore by bus on the 15th. The journey was pleasant and the view next morning was absolutely stunning:

The bus dropped us off at the Panaji bus terminus, and we took a shuttle from there to Vasco – where Ameya (our host) lived. After a nice lunch and a nap, we took off to the beach closest to base camp – Bogmalo. The beach was a quiet and clean with relatively few people around, which made it possible for us to play a game of beach football. We returned home after jumping around in a sea for a while.

We hired a couple of Activa’s the next day (this seems to be the norm for transportation in Goa) and reached Old Goa in an hour or so. We visited the really old church, which was really impressive – it also contained the remains of St. Francis Xavier. The archaeological museum next door was fun too, very informative about the history of Goa. We proceeded to the capital city of Panaji next, and after booking tickets for a river cruise aboard the Princess de Goa for the night, had lunch at the QuarterDeck.

After lunch, we visited Donapaula, a popular Jetty, which was unfortunately under renovation or something. The view was great though, and we enjoyed a nice little ride on the water scooter. After hanging out in Cafe Coffee Day for a while (These places are *everywhere*, I think they’re trying to become the Indian Starbucks :)) we reached the Panaji river coast to board the Princess de Goa. These river cruises seem to be a popular attraction, they basically consist of a few dance shows, a dance floor and an amazing view. We got to see the (in?)famous floating casino on the way too.

My Summer of Code mentor, Matt Lawless, happened to be in Goa too, so we scheduled lunch for the next day. We met at the Calangute post office (which was somewhat close to Matt’s home) and proceeded to the Calangute beach after lunch. My friends, meanwhile, reached the Baga beach, which was just next door to the Calangute beach (the two most famous beaches in Goa). We splashed around in the water for a while, joined by Matt, and then a second lunch

Matt decided to leave, and we went on to try some of the water sports at the beach. We went for a banana ride, a water scooter trip, but the one that took the cake was the parasailing. Nothing like a gentle ride in the sky to rejuvenate you. Flying over water with the beach behind you and the sunset in front is an experience I can’t put in words

The third and last day began with a long ride to south Goa, where we first visited the Benauli beach. This beach was beautiful, the sand was different than the others, and the most fun part was when I was buried by the others:

The rest of the day was spent at GoaKart, which was apparently a national Karting track. Parasailing was great, but karting was really the most exhilarating, especially because we raced and went for 4 rounds

Flickr didn’t let me upload more than 100MB of photos at once, so I moved to Picasa Web Albums instead. I wrote a small script: backr.py that uses James Clarke’s flickr.py to back up all my photos and uploaded them to Picasa Web, which allows me to create as many albums as I want (unlike Flickr). UPDATE: I finally got myself a Flickr Pro account, so pictures are back there again. This time I just used iPhoto to migrate

So, I guess that’s a few more items off my “list of things to do before I die”!