FSLog

I typed out this post long time back and was lazy in posting it. So here is the post about BarCamp 4 day 1. I will post about day 2 tomorrow.

This is an account of my first BarCamp at Bangalore IIM. I thought of
live blogging the event, but I couldn’t get WiFi get working on my
Acer. If anyone has made wifi working with an Acer Aspire 5050, please
do leave a comment. Anyway, this can be thought of as a pseudo-live blog of the event.

Registration
When we(Raju, Jay and me) reached IIMB, there was no crowd at all at
the registration desk. Only about 15 - 20 people were there and we
quickly registered to go to the canteen :). Soon people began to come
by and there was quite a crowd standing outside the auditorium.

Introduction
This BarCamp 4 had many first timers (including us) and the
introductions went on till 10:30 and then people began to leave for
the various collectives in the classrooms.

Bloggers Collective
The first collective that I attended was the blogger’s collective and
it was pretty lame. The discussions were pretty basic and almost
everyone in the room were bloggers. There was a talk on creating
podcasts on odeo. There was also a talk on a blog client called
Chotha. The discussions ranged from various blogging
platforms to self hosting the blog. I think many of them there had
their blogs on Blogger. It was too boring to sit there that we left.

Mobile Collective
Meanwhile Raju had gone for the mobile collective which had a product
called zook which is something related to mobile search. Must be
pretty interesting.

After that we were just walking around the campus and sitting on the
walls. This went on till lunch time, where we were the first ones to
get in and have our full.

Ruby Collective
The afternoon sessions were good, as that was when the Python
collective was scheduled. At the same time, there was a Ruby
collective and I sat there for a talk. It was about Firewatir, a web
application test scripting tool written in Ruby. The idea was
excellent and it is a cool tool for testing basic website with
data. Must look more into it. We left that soon and jumped over to the
python collective.

Python Collective
When I entered, Siddharta was talking about generating sentences using
Markov chain. I missed this talk.
Second was a small company of 3
called Max i Leap technologies, which came to talk about a product of
theirs called Ban Karo. It is a technology which they claim to
completely solve the problem of spam calls on mobile phones. It was
not related to python, but they got about 5 minutes to make their
sales pitch. Here is how it works - You receive a call from a
telemarketer, you inform to Ban Karo by sending a message. Then all
other users who are registered will also get a notification that this
number is a spam caller. It wasn’t very impressive and failed to
arouse any interest in the listeners.
Then came a talk by Brad Allen on Python Users’ Group Unite. He talked
how the various PIGs can get help from PSF and help in spreading about
python. He also told that PSF is ready to financially help groups and
also to register a mailing list in the python.org website. He also
suggested to conduct code sprints twice a week which will bring in
more interest to the members and will also be fun. He also told how
the various PyCons have this lightning talks where each person is
allowed to talk about anything for just 5 minutes and we decided to do
it in this meet.

Lightning Sessions
The lightning sessions were enjoyable and also fun. People could
actually learn more during such sessions than a full hour talk. The
various talks were:

1. reStructured text
2. Using PIL to print badges
3. sudoku solver
4. Python idioms
5. DocStrings
6. pep 8
7. Google site ranking tool
8. web.py
9. globals and locals
10. www.zomega.com
11. os module

The talk on using Python Imaging Library to print badges was really
cool. It was all about proto.in which took place last week in IITM
where about 320 badges were to be printed for each
participant. Editing the text in a image manipulation program is
impossible. Also scaling the font size accordingly was very
tough. Siddharta wrote a python program using the PIL module(which he
is very famous for) which takes a list of names as input and gives out
a directory full of beautiful images ready to be printed. It was
really cool and must look at the code.

UnJam
After all this, we again gathered in the auditorium and the Unband
collective was getting ready for the Unjam where about 6 people got
together and tried to make music impromptu. We left at about 6:30 and
decided to bring in a better band to BarCamp Chennai.

This is the day 1 of BCB4 and it is now really late. Time to sleep and
get up for day 2.