foss.in 2008 :: Final Day

Last Day @ foss.in 2008

Implementing volume-follows-focus in PulseAudio Lennart Poettering Low level plumbing for cgroups Balbir Singh

foss.in 2008 :: Day 4

Day 4 @ foss.in 2008

IndLinux Project BOF Beacon Workout Sharing ideas after Apertium talk Sachin Joshi demo's his Hindi ASR system Flashing the Neo FreeRunner Connecting the FreeRunner with an USB cable and reseting it to boot from NOR dfu-util in action dfu-util writes the kernel and File system images to the device Just Messing Around ! Few more OLPC XO's sighted Lou Bébert brought it his ubuntu studio turntables hookup XwaX UI External USB sound card ( look at scheme diagram) Ubuntu Studio PC Aasim tries his hand at DJing Ramki nails another victim Don't wanna sing!

foss.in 2008 :: Sorting In Indic Locales Workout

Day 3 : Sorting In Indic Locales workout at foss.in 2008.

Indic Workout In Progress Brainstorming Live interaction and collaborative editing using a wiki IRC chat room involved people from remote locations Hack on Checking out Telugu language sorting Getting started with Tibetan Posting hack notes to Foss.in on twitter

Mumbai Burning

27 November 2008 Mumbai, India

27 February 1933, Berlin, Germany

This picture of Mumbai Taj burning spew all across the front page of the mornings paper reminds me of another photo of the Reichstag fire. Following the news from mumbai .

foss.in 2008

Photos from Day One of foss.in in Bangalore.

JN Tata Auditorium, IIsc Bangalore
Event Registration Counters Waiting for my turn Security chap wails 'laptops, laptops and more laptops' Gearing Up! Awwe What's that error! Getting a early morning Caffinee fix Lean crowds this year too Atul welcomes everyone to Foss.in 2008 Harald Welte gives keynote address KDE stall Beagle Board Beagle Board running E17 Exploring Freerunner New offering from Nokia Kapil's Debian Workout

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Cellphone Woes of a Weary Traveller

'Somethings' they say, 'remain a mystery until someone comes along'. Few hours into the journey, I could feel some discomfort near the crotch and it has nothing to do with the pretty young thing few seats down the aisle. I forgot to switch off the cellphone and the constant jumps between tower, signal hunting has not only drained the battery but the handset was getting bit hot in my trouser pocket. Perhaps keeping the phone in offline mode seems to be better option, since I can quickly go online and make few calls when the trains stops in a station somewhere.

Like most people I store all my contacts in the cellphone and absolutely none in my head. I stopping jotting down numbers on paper ever since the my address book floated away in a house flood caused by an open water tap. Last heard it was somewhere near the tropic of cancer. Darn! I don't fancy being stranded in a strange town with a dead cellphone battery. (Note to myself: start carrying dead tree address book)

A soft spoken clerk travelling with me told me that cellphones get discharged very quickly on these train journeys. He regularly commutes between two states to be with wife and young child (another facet of modern life) and he carries a fully charged extra cellphone battery with him. Finding an free electrical outlets on the train is a rarity. Looking around I found various exotic battery chargers like this of Chinese make ;) . (Its hard to get a steady shot in a moving train)

The cellphones have come a long way from monochrome displays and byte size memories. But the battery technology has barely kept up with the advances, it still is fraught with lack of good backup time, memory effects and performance degradation over time etc. Anyone who going to find a fix and come with a better cellphone batteries would find a nice cosy place in the next billionaires list and win the gratitude of innumerable cellphone users worldwide.