[PLUG] [Event Report] FUDCon Pune, November 4-6, 2011, India

Tue Nov 8 11:45:20 IST 2011

FUDCon Pune 2011
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Day I, Friday, November 4, 2011

I arrived early on day I of FUDCon Pune 2011 [1] to help with the
registration desk. We had different counters for speakers and
volunteers, and for delegates. Fedora banners were placed at various
seminar locations on campus to indicate where the talks and sessions
were being held.

I attended the keynote by Jared Smith [2], the Fedora Project Leader.
The illustrations used in his presentation, 'Fedora "State of the
Union" Address' [3] were really good. I then proceeded to the
classrooms to attend Ramakrishna Reddy's talk on 'Developer Survivor
Manual' [4]. He addressed essential things that newbie developers need
to know, and demoed various revision control systems.

Lunch was served at 12 noon, and then I moved on to attend the 'Fedora
Remix and the Community' [5] talk by Danishka Navin [6]. He shared his
experience with the Hanthana [7] project, which is a Fedora remix that
has support for Sinhalese, and Tamil and has been deployed at various
schools in Sri Lanka. Fedora is one of the first and largest user of
Gitolite [8], and I was happy to meet its author, Sitaram Chamarthy,
from TCS Innovation Labs, Hyderabad, India. His talk [9] was filled
with numerous examples from people using gitolite. The other large
users of gitolite are KDE and kernel.org. I then attended the
'GlusterFS' [10] talk by Krishna Srinivas from Red Hat, who gave an
overview of the Gluster file system, its architecture, and uses.

Day II, Saturday, November 5, 2011

I arrived early again on day II of FUDCon Pune 2011. The day's
proceedings started with a keynote by Harish Pillay [11] on his
thoughts on community work, and on his new role as the lead of
Community Architecture [12]. I then attended the 'Security in the Open
Source world!' talk [13] by Eugene Teo [14] and Huzaifa Sidhpurwala
[15]. Their talk covered quite a bit on the various security threats,
and on how they are handled.

Since I attended the GlusterFS overview talk on the first day, I
wanted to follow it up with the 'GlusterFS: Hacking HOWTO' talk [16]
by Amar Tumballi. He suggested newbies to read on translators as a
starting point to work with Gluster, along with few ideas that they
could start with. Lunch was again served at 12 noon. After lunch, I
headed to Seminar Hall 2 for my talk on 'Quite Universal Circuit
Simulator - A Qt Love Story' [17] [18]. It is an introduction to
electrical circuit theory using circuit components as "fictional" men
and women. The example circuits were created using qucs-0.0.15. The
examples are available at gitorious:

  $ git clone git://gitorious.org/qucs-a-qt-love-story/qucs-a-qt-love-story_prj.git

After my talk, I went to the auditorium to attend the talk by Amit
Shah [19] on 'Linux Virtualization' [20] followed by Kashyap
Chamarthy's [21] talk on 'Virtualization with Libvirt' [22]. They had
given a good overview of virtualization in the Linux kernel, and
available tools that one could use. I do use Publican [23], and thus
attended Jared Smith's talk on the same. Publican does insert blank
pages to ensure that new chapters start on the right-hand side if the
content were to be printed as a book. For the final talk of the day, I
attended Rahul Sundaram's [24] session on Askbot for Fedora [25], and
the roadmap and features that he is interested in. We then travelled
to Hotel Parc Estique [26] for the FUDPub!

Final Day, Sunday, November 6, 2011

As a follow-up to my talk on QUCS [17] on day II of FUDCon Pune 2011,
I wanted to create circuit examples on the final day from a text book
that was being followed for basic electrical engineering course work.
This would be a supplement that a student can use when learning
circuit theory. Anuj More and Payas Awadhutkar joined in, and we
worked on schematics from chapter I of 'Fundamentals of Electrical
Engineering' [27] by Leonard S. Boborow, a.k.a "Babu Rao" in India.
The schematics were created in qucs-0.0.16, and are available from
Payas Awadhutkar gitorious repo:

  $ git clone git://gitorious.org/qucs-baburao/qucs-baburao.git

I would like to thank all the volunteers from College of Engineering,
Pune [28] and Prof. Abhijit A M [29] who coordinated with us in
organizing this conference. Thanks also goes to the Fedora
contributors who helped in getting things done. Special thanks to Red
Hat for sponsoring the event, and for their wonderful support.

We trained many students over the years as part of the Fedora project.
I was very happy to see them as speakers and present on the things
that they have been working on, and also help others when required
during the conference. This is the best outcome that I take from the
event.

The photos that I took at FUDCon Pune 2011 are available in my /gallery [30].

[1] FUDCon Pune 2011. http://fudcon.in/

[2] Jared Smith. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jsmith

[3] Fedora "State of the Union" Address.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/fedora-state-union-address

[4] Developer Survival Manual.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/developer-survival-manual-impatient-developer-guide-groking-source

[5] Fedora Remix and the Community.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/fedora-remix-and-community

[6] Danishka Navin. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Snavin

[7] Hanthana project. http://www.hanthana.org

[8] Gitolite. https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite

[9] Gitolite by Sitaram Chamarthy.
http://fudcon.in/sites/default/files/slides/gitolite-at-fudcon-india-2011.pdf

[10] GlusterFS.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/glusterfs-red-hat-storage-storage-red-hat

[11] Harish Pillay. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:HarishPillay

[12] Community Architecture.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Community_Architecture

[13] Security in the Open Source world.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/security-open-source-world

[14] Eugene Teo. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Eteo

[15] Huzaifa Sidhpurwala. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Huzaifas

[16] GlusterFS Hacking HOWTO. http://fudcon.in/sessions/glusterfs-hacking-howto

[17] Quite Universal Circuit Simulator - A Qt Love Story.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/qucs-qt-love-story

[18] Quite Universal Circuit Simulator. http://qucs.sourceforge.net/

[19] Amit Shah. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Amitshah

[20] Linux Virtualization.
http://fudcon.in/sites/default/files/slides/Virtualization-with-libvirt.pdf

[21] Kashyap Chamarthy. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kashyapc

[22] Virtualization with Libvirt.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/virtualization-libvirt

[23] Publican. https://fedorahosted.org/publican/

[24] Rahul Sundaram. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Sundaram

[25] Askbot on Fedora.
http://fudcon.in/sessions/ask-fedora-community-support-and-knowledge-base

[26] Hotel Parc Estique. http://www.parcestique.com/pune.htm

[27] Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering.
http://www.amazon.ca/Fundamentals-Electrical-Engineering-Leonard-Bobrow/dp/0195105095

[28] College of Engineering, Pune. http://www.coep.org.in/

[29] Prof. Abhijit A M. http://www.coep.org.in/index.php?profile=abhijit.comp

[30] Photos. http://www.shakthimaan.com/Mambo/gallery/album72

-- 
Shakthi Kannan
http://www.shakthimaan.com