AutotuA Weekly Status Report - I (and more ;)

Yes, I am alive and kicking. Although at a much slower pace than I would've liked ;)

So I sent my first weekly report over yesterday, you can either read the (excessively long and probably boring and or confusing) weekly report or you can, well, do something else :P

And guess what, next time onwards, all you have to do is checkout the AutotuA news page or subscribe to the "gsoc" label on this blog to stalk me.

Oh, right, this will also probably be my first post on the FLOSS India Planet!

Hello everyone!~ I'm Nirbheek Chauhan (also called as "slacker #1" by some). I was one of the co-ordinators of this tiny little event in IIT Kanpur's tech-festival Techkriti.

You might have heard about it and maybe seen the awesome speakers (and posters ;) of the event.

You've probably had the pleasure of conversing with the mastermind behind the whole event.

And maybe, just maybe, you've heard about "FOSSKriti" :D

PS: We'll (hopefully) be back next year, so this is shameless advance publicity ;p

rohitj and #fosskriti

So it all started sometime ago when rohitj said that someone should kick him from #fosskriti because the channel was distracting him too much

<rohitj> kick me from this channel. else I am seeing it again and again
<hippieindamakin8> :)))
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to devilsadvocate
* devilsadvocate has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (User terminated!)
* devilsadvocate removes channel operator status from devilsadvocate
* devilsadvocate grins

So, it was all started by devilsadvocate, and now rohitj can't spend too long on the channel without getting repeatedly kicked :D

* rohitj (n=rohitj@203.200.95.130) has joined #fosskriti
<hippieindamakin8> hey rohitj welcome back
<rohitj> thank you thank you
>ChanServ< op #fosskriti
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to bheekling
* bheekling has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (bye bye! :P)
* bheekling removes channel operator status from bheekling
<bheekling> This is fun :>
* rohitj (n=rohitj@203.200.95.130) has joined #fosskriti
<rohitj> thank you bheekling
<rohitj> now stop it
>ChanServ< op #fosskriti
<rohitj> :P
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to bheekling
* bheekling has kicked rohitj from #fosskriti (again! wheee)
* bheekling removes channel operator status from bheekling

This is phun >:->

wth?

Gosh, it's been a month since I last blogged, and that too while this has been a very blogpost-philic month. FOSSKriti started and got over, freed.in was attended and praised for high-quality talks while the Indian FOSS community was boo-ed for low attendance at the same. FOSDEM came and went, and left several hundred hangovers in Europe.

I became aware of LinuxChix's Indian Chapter, was delighted to know about it, and decided to become a part of the community, and spread the word :)
I also became painfully aware of how much damage a vocal minority can do to a community that's starting up. I constantly winced during the flamewars on the Gentoo mailing lists during it's "Great Fall", as some have come to call it (though I disagree with them). Seeing the same munitions being deployed on the LC-IN ML gives me a depressing premonition of disaster.

The GDM 2.22 rewrite wasn't finished in time for inclusion in GNOME 2.22 (Hard Code Freeze), but gvfs managed to port more stuff and also get a "working" ftp backend, removing another bug from the 2.22 blocker bugs list.

The Xorg people were shouted at for not taking care of hald/dbus restarts, and patches were committed to fix the issue.

Gentoo Trustees were elected, and the results were expected and hilarious at the same time :-)
GSoC '08 was announced, and applications were invited from the various Open Source projects.
Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò framed his (and coincidentally my) thoughts about devs participating in GSoC (better than I could have) in a mail to the ML.

Beagle is still pondering about GSoC -- let's see how that turns out :)

*bheekling realises that the above paras are probably missing stuff, are somewhat anachronistic, terse, overflowing with links, and lacking continuity, but he believes that a jumbled-up link-eyebleed post is better than a forever procrastinated one :P

Fossकृति!

See that logo on the right at the bottom of the side-bar?



You don't? Scroll down a bit.



Arey, the one that's Black and Orange, (was made by me =), and looks like this:




Yep, that's right, we're having FOSSKriti at Techkriti '08 (IITK's Tech festival) from 13th to 17th Feb.

We're going to have Talks, HackFests, BoFs, Workshops, and goodies. If you're going to Techkriti, be sure to drop by.

It's the first time it's being held, so it'll certainly be an interesting event - especially with the Beagle/dashboard Hackfest Arun and I plan to organise ;)


Planning on having loads of fun that weekend,

~bheekling :^)