“The network will go down when Andrew moves out”
With those words Gora hustled everyone out of the halls when it appeared that we were shooting past the time. Of course, there was fun during the wonderful dinner when Gora’s beer can (containing around 1/4th the remaining quantity) was emptied into a various glasses and replaced with packaged water. What happened next is anyone’s guess 
Day 2 begins a bit late - but hey, network is up and so up go the pictures. Schuyler Erle/Mikel Maron start their Open Street Map talk with animations of their excursions around Mumbai and other places and emphasizing how it can actually represent multiple points of view on the same map.The process followed by mapping agencies and commercial organizations have limitations in terms of workforce and coverage. The “collaborative” model provided by Free and Open Source software provides an ideal counterpoint towards making access to cartographic information easier. Taking multiple examples from Google Maps, Yahoo maps and maps from other cartographic organizations, they point out the fallacies in the belief that Satellite Maps or Sat Nav systems are accurate in terms of data accuracy.
UPDATE
Samiah gets a “LUG-D syndrome” - a sprained neck as a result of lugging around too much load. Rene, Kiran and Andreas ensure that the Gyaan hall has all the crowds. Dhyaan is empty enough for Raj Mathur to fiddle around with trying to broadcast the conclave-which-did-not-happen over the Internet. I discreetly catch up on a large bit of work related mails and of course prod Andrew to explore the possibility of publishing GNU books at a cheaper price. I catch the end bits of Rakesh Peter’s wonderful talk on “Software Defined Radio” after Shreyas twitters about how interesting the demos are. Runa’s up next with her talk on “Setting Up a Translation Community”.
We run through the talk from Jayesh Gohel at a fairly fast clip to arrive at the end of the day. By then all the chatter and gossip was around the standard freed.in fare - kebabs and more kebabs. We all wait for the conclave to end or at least somehow arrive at a situation where the folks at the conclave can take some time out for dinner. Lots of pieces of hardware are found around the podium and we keep on announcing them. Had a small aside with Andreas as to how the Indic and related text layout support in Scribus is going to enable Indic to be used by the largest possible section of the population. Passed to him my blog about the DTP issues and he was pleasantly surprised to hear about little magazines. I got to know about the fact that church groups seem to be the largest constituency of Scribus users for their newsletters, pamphlets and the like.
Wonderful dinner - awesome conversation and fun moments with photographs. What we got was quotes and quotes.
Gora: If anyone sms-es me tonight, I’ll murder that person
Shreyas: I want to open a Boozegoolla shop
Friji: I am not like Plan 9, I am much more mature
Gora: Even if you had the last beer can, I am not going to have it from your hands
Shreyas: Man, with a 1km mall, run inside it 42 times you will have a marathon
Sunil: I have another question. Again.
Tirveni: I am SuperMan with a SuperBaby inside
Jace: I strongly object …
Gora: Use the microphone dammit and learn to wait for your turn.
Kishore: I am Obee Van CanYouBee
[…] The best talk of the second day was “Hacking the Airwaves with GNU Radio” by Rakesh Peter, a talk which I am attending for the second time (attended it during foss.in 2007). Very impressive and great to know the work that is going on. Shreyas came out with his “dormant” idea of setting up a Radio transmission during foss.in 2008. It sounds like a very nice idea to me. The day ended with loads of quotes flowing from the mouths of various people. Details are here in this post by Sankarshan. Day 3 begins with me feeling the OLPC XO laptop for the first time (Courtesy: Sayamindu). Initially, I was feeling very uncomfortable with the Sugar interface but eventually started liking it. Then it was my turn to take the stage and in my opinion the talk went pretty well with a few questions asked. The slides of the presentation can be found here. The find of the day was “Purisia font”. I think I will use this font for most of my presentations from now on. Flight back home was very relaxing with me getting a seat right after the First Class cabin. Good leg room and the food served was nice. […]
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