Excitement and tension builds around us as we are just another month away from mukt.in 2008.
Our IRC channel #mukt.in, is attracting more people and their questionnaire.
I would like to mention a special thanks to unixpod guys. They provided us a free server to host our site, an svn, bugzilla and most importantly very friendly support. They are young guys with awesome talent; some of them are younger to me.
They are upgrading services on their servers and it would be of real help if we could donate for good service (Donate button on bottom right corner).
The new services being added to unixpod (especially the LDAP support) is going to take some time. We decided to move our repository to googlecode as we were adding to their already heavy traffic.
Also, most of us would have noticed that mukt.in 2008 registrations are open; we have separate forms for attendees and speakers.
We are trying to include another new feature at mukt.in 2008 - FOSS Start-up Meet up. This is aimed to be a collaboration ground for few FOSS wanna-be entrepreneurs, and may be some already entrepreneurs as mentors. Another wonderful ground to find out if services can be exchanged/outsourced between FOSS based start ups.
Qvantel is the only current confirmed sponsor yet. Discussions are in progress with few other organisations and hopefully we should be able to grab a few more sponsors to sustain the event.
Why do companies/organizations sponsor `free & open source software` events?
The most common answer would be ‘Marketing’. On a second thought, companies/organizations have another good reason to do that, especially `foss & open source` based start-up’s.
Wondering what that could be?
Supposedly, it one of the best ways to express that they support FOSS community. The priority between marketing and showing support could vary for each company.
In the end, it matters that they have supported.
One such wonderful ground is mukt.in; should we say mukt.in v2 or mukt.in 2008.
We are trying to create multitude opportunities of marketing for sponsoring companies by providing banner space on venue, logos on mukt.in website, conference hall banners, slots for talks to demo company’s products/service, job center and more.
This serves true for any domain, be it product development or a service company.
Details of sponsorship opportunities are available in our sponsorship brochure.
Readers of my blog can help by passing this information to potential sponsors or sending us contact details.
Before we move on to mukt.in, I wish a very happy birthday to my grandpa. May I get some of his intelligence, wits and goodwill for others.
Oh heck, I am supposed to present gift, not ask for! 
And, mukt.in venue has been finalized today. (in writing by Dr. S.Ramachandram, HoD, Dept of CSE, University College of Engineering, O.U)
The verbal approval was already done last monday; I requested him for a documented approval, incase the sponsoring companies needed them and it was granted today.
So, mukt.in 2008 is set for 1,2,3 Aug 2008 at OU, CSE Department. Party time! 
Now a credits list and thanks to
Dr. S.Ramachandram, for his precious time - We’ve bugged him about over 4 times discussing mukt.in
Aishwarya - for helping me with lots of technical issues; gave me time to work for the venue finalizing.
Pavithran - numerous to & fro journeys (Hyd - Chennai) for mukt.in
Deependra, Shriphani, Ravi Chandra - for trusting me that I’d not take 2 months to fix us a venue 
and others who have helped and not-helped.
Its time to change the topic for #mukt.in now. 
Phew, I am back home after a long and tiring stay at Chennai again. I say tiring because, there was not much to do in the extra 3days of my stay due to missing the train.
Luckily I didn’t miss the KDEGames meeting. It was decided that there will be a student’s meet for all GSoC participants of this year. That’s really sweet of the kdegames team.
My GSoC application (KDragons) to KDE has moved from status ‘Available for review’ to ‘Ranking in progress’.
I am back to building KDE4 on my desktop.
At mukt.in, the website theme has been updated with something that looks and feels like open source software atleast. The theme is still under development, so please do not get mad with the colors yet.
The blog and ToDo links have been removed.
Blogs will be updated under volunteers section and ToDo goes in the discussion forum. We’ve decided to leave the wiki as a playground/sandbox for everyone. Selected Ideas from wiki will make it to the website.
Our chat still runs mibbit ajax based web irc client; one of the drupal modules. I wonder if it supports connecting to any other irc server. We may have to configure this to auto-join irc.devnode.org; thanks to devnode for enabling us on their webchat server.
mukt.in welcomes suggestions/comments anytime.
A sudden travel trip has landed me in Chennai again.
People searching for me in Hyderabad? Yay, I will be back. Don’t you guys worry.
Yesterday, I experimented configuring Trac in cgi mode; hopefully soon I should be able to use mod_python also. It will be posted on this blog for knowledge sharing.
Today, I read few things about Windows Terminal Server 2003 and its licensing modes.
(No weird looks please, I am still a faithful Free & Open Source Addict)
Much to my surprise, the documentation/techinfo of the product on Microsoft’s site talks more about licenses than technical issues.
Bleh, to them 
Now, about mukt.in (I guess this will be the first post with category mukt.in) - Shriphani is still our hawk-eye blogger; I am just going to pen down the developments from my side.
As promised to my team, I’ve started the artwork today. April 2, 2008. I know it is quite a delay already, but then I hope to catch up soon.
So, here is the first variant of mukt.in - 2008 launch logo. >>>>>>> on right >>
Anyone interested to improve on the mukt.in artwork series can get in touch with me at #mukt at irc.freenode.net to get the image sources. If you don’t have an IRC client, you could login here; use a meaningful Nickname and select Channel list as #mukt.in
Unfortunately I am still on xcf. Will soon be moving to svg after building KDE4.1 on my desktop.
Now hungry; going to hunt for food. Ciao
