mukt.in rolls again

Happy belated Independence day to all and hmm well wish happy days every day anyway.

So, well I’ve been missing from my blog, for mm..4 months? The new job keeps me pretty busy and I really mean busy.
I wish I had like few more hands and my brain would be upgradable with newer, faster processor; but sigh!

So why did I make time to start blogging again?
Yo yeah, look at the title. mukt.in rolls again. for 2009!

mukt.in - the unconference.

The team must have pretty much got frustrated with me for doing nothing for so long and finally a brave mustache’er (this is different from musketeer), stood up, booted his laptop and wrote this post.
http://groups.google.com/group/mukt/browse_thread/thread/1c528be85aecac1b?hl=en#

People have decided that IIIT-Hyd would be a real good place for this year’s venue. ( Thanks to mbuf for this. )
I see some new names on the list too (or have I been away from the list for too long?)

Well, well the wheels got rolling again.. and hopefully we can un-conference by/before december.
And if you do spot me during mukt.in 09, do not, I say do not charge at me. Charge koolhead17; he’s a nice punching bag.

mukt.in V2 concludes

mukt.in v2 counts at 114, 102, 61 attendees for 1st ,2nd, 3rd August.

v2 had loads of improvements. Elite speakers, linuxchix, enthusiasts and lots of students were seen in action at the venue.
I’ve missed all the talks/sessions and the maximum duration I might have attended any is about a little over 7 minutes. Sometimes I wish I were not an organiser and could attend them peacefully without having to run around for tasks.

Day1: The schedule was delayed for about an hour; including the lunch. The first talk `FOSS, projects and contributions` was dropped due to organising issues at the venue. Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi presented talk on Scalability of Web Apps; intended audience were experienced professionals. Some newbies and students felt out of place with the highly technical talk. Guess this happens when audience get misplaced in parallel sessions.

Linux installation Sessions were running in parallel, demoing basics of partitioning, to-do and not-to-do’s of a typical installation scenario.

Sahana Disaster Management by Ajay Kumar received tremendous response. Qwick – an open source java web development stack was also demoed. We ended with a energetic BOF initiated by Shakthi Kannan, Qvantel.

Day2: Real fun and blast was seen happening at the event. Vid’s talk on `Women in Libre Software`, followed by Poky and Openmoko talks by Somanath Avvari and Shakthi Kannan, two sessions on Ruby by Joel Rosario and Thyagarajan, Intro to Drupal by Warren Nohara, Font Designs by Hiran, Sphinx by Shyam, a talk on usability and open source by Vinod kept attendees busy.

The labs were on fire with people shooting around each other in OpenArena. 3 players won a gamepad each.

Day ends with a fun filled BOF session on students in FOSS communities.

Day3: Final day of mukt.in v2 saw GSoC project demo by Sudharshan S, marvelous talk on `How to lead Open Source projects` by Sebastian Deckers, KIWI-LTSP hands-on by Jigish Gohil, Linux Backtrack3 by Rakesh Madupu, Learning Open Source Development by Antono Solar John, Electronics Lab using free software by Aanjhan, Fedora Lab sessions by Siddharth and few student projects on Qt, GNOME VFS and LAMP. Joomla was another demo intended for students only.

We had few photo sessions after the closure and lot of fun during offline discussions with the students.

Some blog posts on mukt.in v2:

Sup3rkiddo

AJuOnLiNE

Vid Ayer

CyberOrg

tuxmaniac

Some albums on mukt.in v2

http://www.shakthimaan.com/Mambo/gallery/album49

http://picasaweb.google.com/jigish.gohil/MuktIn

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/hhemanth/MuktIn02

I hope I did not forget any other links here. 🙂

mukt.in 2008 Schedule up

After loads of restructuring, rearranging and rescheduling, the talks, demos and sessions page are finally up.

With just 6 days to go for the event (Oh, I will start the counter tomorrow), there are pretty much tasks left unfinished. I just hope we can complete them in time.
The daily 4 hour power cut is driving me nuts.
This was an unforeseen hick up for the event. The venue host does have a generator, but it is a diesel shortage season. We need to stock up diesel for encountering power interrupts at the event.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of volunteers for the event from Department of Computer Science, University College of Engineering, Osmania University.
This should give me some helping hand at tasks.

Thanks to everyone who contributes. 🙂

Spread the word about mukt.in 2008; some posters will be available for help.

A month away..

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.

mukt.in 2008 – Call for sponsors.

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.

mukt.in 2008 Venue finalized

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. 😉

Yay! Back home.

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. 🙂

Artwork starts

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 😛