Lazy me!! caught cold as I landed into Delhi's cold weather after the
cool climes of Bangalore.

Linux Bangalore 2003 Diary
<SoapBox>
3 Days and 96 talks in parallel in 5 different Halls(so I had to pick
and choose).
The event was started with customary lighting of the Multi-wick
Lamp(real quick without much ado) by the Indian Linux User Group
Coordinators(includes Yours Truly representing Linux Delhi) for a 1000+
 audience.
 
Partial list of talks (in no particular order) I liked 
find my comments below:-

1. Applying the Lessons of Open Source to Commercial Development 
by Biju Chacko Red Hat India Pvt Ltd
Really loved the comment about Documentation. Write Once and Use
everywhere.
2. MySQL Optimization and Scaling Tips Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo has some of the biggest Databases running on MySQL.
When you finally find that the Disk is now the only bottleneck that
remains for performance tuning you have achieved the first level of
Nirvana on MySQL performance tuning. MySQL is is such a small footprint
database that most people never thought it required any tuning and it
ran well for most people out of the box. However when it is put into the
enterprise it requires some real thought into it now. Jeremy explains
this MySQL'ish thought process rather well analysing what most people do
wrong(they too did it wrong the first time).
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mysql-optimization.html

3. Hacking XUL Applications Sudhakar 'Thaths' Chandrasekharan
Extremely useful starting point for anyone who wishes to develop
cross-platform applications around the mozilla container. Applications
can be developed around the browser with a customizable GUI defined in
XML(XUL) files. Checkout some of the XUL applications at 
http://www.mozdev.org/faq.html#app and more philosophy of XUL apps.

4. Mono and GNOME: 
Rapid Application Development in Unix, the Best of
both worlds. by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman Ximian/Novell

Best PR effort for Mono Platform on Linux. 
They showed how easy it is to create Cross Platform High Performance
Distributed Modern SOAP/XML based Webservices and Desktop Applications
using great products that Mono Project created for no noticiable
performance degradation as compared to native code. 
The Mono C# compiler compiles itself with 3 seconds (all of 50000) lines
of code.
So once you have all your memory allocation/de-allocation problems out
of the way and you work in a ultra-fast Object Oriented component
environment life is fun. 
Even more importantly code developed by a huge lot of developers working
on non-free platforms can now be deployed without change on linux.

5. Embedding Linux on the Encore Simputer
Samyeer Metrani Encore Software Limited
Its easy to do it if you are doing it for the second time.
So once you have people from encore telling us how to hack the kernel
and where to hack the kernel. Patch and other concepts. What changes
frequently and what doesn't. Very developer friendly tutorial. 
5. J2EE Server infrastructure with linux
VaibhaV Sharma  Ishi Systems Inc.
Scope of J2EE infrastructure across Linux. Discussed the various
alternatives possible and the need for a properly setup J2EE
infrastructure( Music to my ears)
Information from his talk complemented my talk (see below) too well
except that I talked only about Open Source Tools.
6. Rapid Applications with KDE
Sirtaj Singh Kang KDE
Did you know you could automate the KDE applcation services from shell
scripting. Each and every function from the KDE applications is exposed
to DCOP server from where you can script those. Sirtaj also demonstrated
his under 100 lines of code Python(for all you Python lovers out there)
Application in KDE which he would release after he has added some bloat
to it. Such a lot of KDE tricks.
7. Starting and maintaining a Free Software project
Naba Kumar GNOME
Avoid flame wars. Avoid linking to non-free libraries. Host at
sourceforge or other forge sites for the community to make use of free
infrastructure.
Apart from the usual open source lessons. 

Apart from attending talks I interacted with Novell guyz.
Novell seems to be a good friend of FLOSS community after having
acquired Ximian/Suse with initiatives they support the backend for like
http://www.gnomebangalore.org
http://www.gnome.org/bounties(do checkout this one)

Indlinux, Anjuta, KDE projects also had their exhibhits at Linux
Bangalore 2003. I don't need to say much for Anjuta and KDE they are too
famous. 
Indlinux has pretty much delivered on the promises that we keep hearing
from proprietory vendors ( which they will not deliver ). Cheers!! 
Got an IndLinux CD (I think its a Live CD ). Which I'll try to demo once
I have used it.

The following talks from Linux Delhi Members can be repeated at Linux
Delhi if we can arm-twist the speakers for the upcoming meets from Jan
onwards, the Dec. meet already has an agenda.

1. SSO technologies on linux by Tarun Upadhyay Induslogic
2. Build your own Opensource Firewall Kishore Bhargava Linkaxis
Technologies
3. Opensource for Windows Kishore Bhargava Linkaxis Technologies
4. Rapid Development Environment for Java Enterprise Applications using
Open Source Tools. -- By Tarun Dua Linux Delhi/PervasiveOne Solutions


Had an opportunity to interact with Harald (IPtables) Welte who was
miffed with a huge number of Proprietory router/Firewall/Gateway device
vendors violating GPL and his copyright including the Linksys Access
Device. This guy was fixing/looking at bugs as he waited to speak.
Downright heroic. 

I wish to write more about the amazingly eventful LB 2003 and the
wonderful people behind it however I think I would need a followup
writeup for that. In any case no amount of adulation bestowed on all the
organizers, extremely helpful volunteers(who took care of every single
delegate and speaker) can 

T-Shirts: Yes. We gained some open source knowledge about T-Shirts 
which would hopefully find the release once we have the logo finalized.

All those who are registering for T-Shirts and want to pay in advance
(My Views: We can/should discount for those who pay in advance depending
on quantity ordered) can e-mail me offlist with [TSHIRT] tag in the
subject line. More on this topic under a new thread by tomorrow 
(keep watching this space)
</SoapBox>

-- 
http://www.tarundua.net
Nothing you ever wanted to find about Tarun Dua


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