Impressions From The Future

It seems that Chennai too is fast catching up w/ Mobile Monday spirit. Long back I have wondered where’s Chennai in the Indian mobile monday map. Varun, is spearheading Chennai chapter and MoMo Chennai is at it’s second edition with Forum Nokia sponsoring the event. This is on Feb 16th - a saturday and Not on a Monday. In several MoMos we had this discussion of why not have a Mobile Monday on other weekdays - this is because though many people aspire to make it to MoMo, most get struck by the busy schedules of Monday. I don’t know whether it is a decision based on the fact above. This is the fifth MoMo in india. Wish MoMo Chennai a great success through several interesting sessions, demos and networking !

As a debian lover I should be talking about Debconf. Indeed no ! It’s about DefCon, the world’s largest Hacking Conference. I have always wondered why India doesn’t have something on these lines. As a software nation and world’s software destination India should be in the fore front of such a creative arena.

ClubHack is a humble beginning on the lines of Defcon and a small step to project our software capability on creative lines. When this idea was suggested by Rohit over a cup of coffee it was overwhelmingly accepted. It’s been almost a year and it’s here now on the 9^th of December 2007 in Pune.

Apart from a first of a kind in India, we have outlined a clear objective for ClubHack. That is must provide space for creativity, lateral thinking, and bring the guys to the forefront who wears the BlackHat and resides in darkness. And last but not the least, we will try to give the word hacker, the meaning it deserves.

Just to emphasize, the dilemma of calling a hacker as a person with negative connotation or no continues, we are on the side that a hacker is one who finds a hole or a bug or suggest an improvement in the existing product. The product being anything from a software to telephone to washing machine. Crackers are the malicious creatures whom we always want to get rid off.

It would be more than apt to address a hacker as a creative person. Any software product can be created in one of the n number of ways. And for the hacker it takes a lateral bend of mind unthought-of of by the programmer or sometimes to traverse all the n number of possibilities to find a hole or fine tune according to his needs.

ClubHack is invitation only. This is for several reasons, but on the outline it is for anybody who feels that they have done “something” to any s/w or hardware and has improved or disproved it, game mods etc. If you feel that you have the “credentials” send a short note and we will send you the invitation. Go here to register.

ClubHack is in the making. We are striving hard to make a mark on the international scale. If you want to sponsor the event pls go here. And do spread the word. Ciao !

Even though it’s raining cats and dogs we have destined to have our third edition of BarCamp Pune on 7th July at Persistent Systems . Be there to learn more and know what’s happening at the edge of the technology world. Go here to know what is BarCamp and how it’s changing the conference landscape. To enroll yourself edit the BarCamp wiki.

Lately just got curious on maps & related tagging on how to use it more efficeintly on the web. I am using both Google maps and Windows Live Search on my mobile. More on it later coz that deserves a separate post. A well built map with all directions and distances which can integrate well with the browser will be a killer app.

There are host of map related services from Mapquest to Ask Maps which is gaining popularity now. All in all Mapquest seems to be the leader getting much more traffic than google/yahoo/windows live. The Mapquest interface have got up so well these days with Ajax. But even in the good old days when mapquest used crayon color interface & when Google came up with all the satellite imageries and made a splash, still it cant beat Mapquest just because it is more perfect, more directions. The war between data & ajax have declared that accurate data is the winner. Surprisingly all of them uses data from either Navteq or TeleAtlas or both leaders in GIS imagery. In all of the maps we can see the (C) of Naviteq/TeleAtlas.

As far as India is concerned Mapquest has street level maps for Delhi. but not to the extend of Google or yahoo has for US/UK. Others are yet to catch up w.r.t India. With the ever changing infrastructure of the Indian realty scape it will be a challenging task to come up with accurate information. Mumbai freemap from free map server is just a beginning to create an open database map repository, though much detailed ( see BEST bus depots) needs much tags. Neverthless it’s agreat initiative.

The whole list of all things map is here from wikimedia tools. And herecomes the meta map search - Flash Earth to acccess all maps from one place. It also supports open layers which powers free map server. Happy Mapping.

This edition of BarCampPune was Great and kept us on rolling from morning till late into the night coz of the networking dinner. One more memorabilia . The event had it’s own course, to be frank - as it zipped from two session to three, upholding the unconference theme. As I was roaming? I missed most sessions.
The presentation of Rahul Thathoo from Stanford on advt. in Web 2.0 was a different tryout. Atul co-ordinated it very well, synchronizing both voice thru mobile & video thru You Tube. There were a host of presentations most on Web 2.0, mobile, Dev, etc. The Symbiosis volunteers were the one who made our life much easy and let us concentrate on things most important. Thanks guys & gals, truly the enthusiasm & energy you showed ( at times running, dashing) is great and I swear it’s tough to find guys like you. Hope to see you all once again in the same tempo very soon.

From our side, due thanks to Vols,Symbiosis, TCS for sponsorship and above all to the attendees who made the BarCamp a Greaaaaaaat success. Tha camp Wiki is here and more of the Pics here.

Rakesh ?

Brajeshwar has made a cool shot of the dinner venue -> SIMS Swimming pool

This guy says it is his “My Space” . cool dude !

Half of Pune 7. Clocking wisely it is Jatinder, Rohit, Anand, Kiran. Missing are Dibya, Atul & me.

Here we are, me and Dibya in the food court.

Symbi Vols in action !