Conference In Banagalore

FOSS.IN

I attended FOSS.IN 2007, from 4th to 8th December at IISc Bangalore. I decided to attend the conference because of my interest in Firefox browser and Linux Kernel. The conference had great speakers Rusty, Naba, Ulrich, Mitchell Baker and many others. I hope I learned enough to have motivation to work on source code of one of the projects. Overall It was worth the effort of traveling from Mumbai to Bangalore.

I gave a lighting talk on GLPK in 3 minutes to audience of 15 people. I tried to describe why it is good project for people/students who want to improve their programming skills (specifically C and Linux). The reason are that while working on linear program solver one has to think about floating point arithmetic, numerical stability and how to use multiple processors/cores to make program faster.

The lighting talks were good too. You could give a talk on any talk. This guy gave a talk on egg-omelet, it was so good that my mouth was watery :). Thanks Danese for arranging the talks.

Thanks Mozilla team, Fedora team, Sun team, Kernel hackers and all other speakers for interesting talks.

In the evening temperatures dropped to around 16 degrees Celsius. Most of the days I stayed in my hotel room. One evening I visited M. G. Road to buy few T-shirts. Later I realized I could have shopped in Malleshawaram.

Mumbai Airport

My flight to Bangalore was delayed by 30 mins, so I got to spend few hours at Mumbai International. Airport, domestic terminals. It has quite improved, they have increased the security check area, passenger lounge area. CCD and Crossword are there inside the terminal.

Outside the terminal they have build a huge shelter, should be useful in rainy season. So now passengers should be able to catch a cab without getting wet in case of rains.

Jet Airways In-flight Entertainment System

Flight took of in east direction (strip is east-west I think), sky was clear, got to see other side of Mumbai from the sky. The slums actually look beautiful from the sky. This was first time I used Jet's In-flight entertainment system, it was good.

Basically it is a touch screen (medium size), where you can choose the menus. You plug in the head-phone in the whole on the left hand of your seat. They have lots of music options (classical, pop etc.). Later I watched a Friends episode.