Sunday, 30 November 2008
Friday, 28 November 2008
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!Thursday, 27 November 2008
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 twitterWednesday, 26 November 2008
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 .
Tuesday, 25 November 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 WorkoutMore
Foss.in posts on Google Blog Search
Foss.in photos on Flickr
Monday, 24 November 2008
'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.
