Apache and Microsoft have been working quite closely. Both on a win-win situation.  Microsoft treats Apache as their technical research and Apache treats Microsoft as a support for building and taking technologies to another level. This is one collaboration which I really like.. Any open source foundation if backed by a Big Fish is a major success.  Most committers are on a job in their respective companies and working dedicated for Apache! Why? Because the company they work for uses apache products heavily

The event was a 2 day Barcamp & 3 day ApacheCon together. 2-6 November at Marriott Conventional Center , City Center of Oakland. Oakland is pretty cheap compared to San Francisco. Nothing much to see here apart from a good lake(which I missed). You might want to avoid going to West Oakland. Google for “How not to get shot in Oakland”.

The conference had speakers and committers from all around the globe. For those of you who don’t know who a committer. He is a person who will do the actual release and commit the code. Contributers from anywhere can submit code and patches, Its the job of a committer to do the release. There are more than 5-6 committers per project. At least 2-3 committers should review one another’s code and agree to the release of the code so that the release is watched by more than a single eye!

A good project in apache has a good adoption rate. For example Apache Tomcat for Java servlet has a 10,000 downloads per day! And the figures are like this and increasing over the last two years! Now that’s something cool.. ain’t it?

Its the 10th year of the Foundation. Apache has grown to a full scale Open Source foundation which has not only proved that Open source works! , but its processes and operations has made a mark on how an organization should run. Hats Off to you guys! Everything is very process oriented in Apache. They have very formal structure like any other company, but with a major touch of community development.

After all , social networking and community development is all that matters in the end.

Here are some pictures from my trip.

I will be talking about a framework on mobile phones and the topic is:
Building Enterprise Mobile applications without programming.

Some interesting topics I’d like to listen to:

Microsoft Windows Mobile Development – Mayur Tendulkar
Rapid Robotics Development using Microsoft Robotics Studio – Nikhil Dandeker
Mobility application development with moblin – Sachin Kelkar Intel
Performance Tunning on Application Server -Tara Lodh

October 2007, I went to Kolkata for a conference called WebOSS ‘07 and I can probably make out why there’s no way Kolkata can have a barcamp in near future. I tried to carry out a Barcamp in Kolkata. My sympathies to the wonderful city where I grew up.

1. What is BarCamp? A ‘Drinking Bar’ may be…I’m not interested.
2. People don’t know what a WIKI is. They don’t know how to edit it despite the instructions.
3. No one willing to take the effort. They have all the time to sleep.
4. The so called ‘open source’ community sucks big time. The so called HEAD of LUG group look out for publicity more than helping to get a job done. I am not afraid to take the name of Krishnendu Paul who promised and suddenly disappeared.
5. The student community is suppressed by the colleges.
6. The colleges are more interested in Placements rather than knowledge sharing.
7. College professors are trying to get some freelance projects all the time.
8. Big shots like IBM, TCS etc. are least bothered to even have a look.
9. Free T-shirts = Bring in all your friends and leave in next 1 hour.
10. Free food = hog as much as you want.
11. The IT dept of the government want to just hold on conferences and publicity stunts to make their place in the newspaper. I am again not afraid to blame the minister for not checking his Mailbox which is always full. And also to be not available to common people without a PROTOCOL!
11. What is sponsorship? What will I gain. How many people are going to come? This is the question which all news/publicity media ask!
12. Lastly, Who’s wanting to spoil their weekend!

Way to go Kolkata, I don’t see a Barcamp Kolkata until some revolutionary thing happen!
Dear City of Joy, I left you some time back and I don’t feel like returning!

BarCampPune4 is coming up yet again! This time on 16th Feb @ ThoughWorks. I will be speaking but haven’t yet decided on the topic.

I am excited!

For more details:http://barcamp.org/BarCampPune4

I also talked about my research topic on Mobile Navigation – Point and Locate buildings

My desktop is cleaned(less icons),
My wallpaper is set to its logo!
My Slides are almost done!

and I feel good about it!

There are some really cool sessions which I’m really looking forward to attend:

Wishlist includes:

MySQL using JRuby – Priyank Kapadia
Microsoft Silverlight, A new dimension to build rich UI applications by Aditya Thatte
Indian Technology Laws, Indian laws on cyberspace, copyright, trademark and patents by Gokul Narayan
Self Hosting – Is it the future ? by Milind Pandit

I’m disappointed I’ll miss sessions by Abdul Qabiz. I don’t know why he has cut his name!

So see you guys tomorrow at BarCampPune3!

The event will take place at Persistent System Pvt. Ltd, Pune on 7th July(Sat) 2007.

I will be speaking on two topics:

1. Mobile Visualization.
2. How to make a Flash Widget.

I wanted to speak but hadn’t registered myself. When I reached SICSR, I found one of the evening slot was still empty. Dibya inspired me to “JUST fill it in” and I did it! The topic was “RICH UI using FLASH + PHP +MySQL”

I wasn’t prepared at all! Went to a quieter place and started to prepare! After two hours I managed to modify some of my earlier animation and bring up something like a presentation!! Haha!!

Meanwhile I attended Freeman’s session. He was talking on “How to start a start up”. Nice talk. Wanted to know more of it but immediately was lunch break.

But somehow the lunch got delayed and I very quickly managed another session on Mobile Application. It was a nice session based on PDAs. The speaker was from TCS whose name I forgot.

Lunch followed. Nice fried rice and sweeties….

I had a session at 5pm but It somehow got preporned as Brajeshwar’s demo on Photoshop CS3 got postponed or I DUNNO! I talked the stuff which I had developed some time ago. One small flash weather widget which would fetch data from weather.com and also an online showroom which website which I did for West Mill USA shoe store.

I also showed some code in Actionscript and PHP.

My session was followed by Abdul Qabiz’s talk on Apollo, the product coming up in 2007 by adobe.

Networking dinner followed at SIMS and this time I was a volunteer! some good amount of networking happened. Excellent food!

Thanks to the “So Called Organisers”, The volunteers(including me) and all the speakers and everyone!
Catch up some pics of the event…

I wonder Kolkata never had any such events?!! I am very serious in Organizing it in Kolkata!