Pwned! FOSS event concluded!

Duh! Long overdue for this post. Almost 500 students attended the FOSS Fest during Sakshama :-) Mostly undergrad prefinal and final year engineering students. We started barely 20 days before and managed to finish everything right in time! quickfire way :-)

Most of us wishfully had almost none or less than 2-3 hours of sleep for the 3 days of the event, it was fun! - Reason: The days were reserved for the FOSS talks, and the mid-nights for Hands-on DIY sessions.

Thanks to: Leslie and Ellen from Google Open Source Office, Rahul Sundaram and Shankarsan for Fedora goodies, Kinshuk for the help he provided in managing the event, kunal for the t-shirts printing, skbohra, niyam, paras, manu, chits, jdk, zugard team and all the juniors who worked hard together to make the event success :-)

The experience can't by described in this short sleep deprived post. :-) Till the longer version, a small Flickr Stream of some photographs.

FOSS GN09 Coming Up Soon

We've planned a FOSS event in college from 28-31st October. We'll be talking to people about enhancing their contribution to the commnity, code, and the spirit behind.

Probably we'll be having Niyam Bhushan. So we'll be talking and doing an unconference on Human Computer Interaction, Multitouch, programming gestures, why a programmer should consider design while writing code etc. We've also planned to do a hackfest on how to build a DIY multitouch table with junk hardware etc. and writing some gestures code in AS3

Other planned talks are about the future internet and Disaster management using Sahana (by skbohra), etc.

Detailed plan can be seen here in the brochure that I designed yesterday :-)

FOSS

Intuitive Gesture Pad for Hindi typing

I happened to stumble across a gesture pad devised by Shekhar Borgaonkar. Needless to say, its one of the most wonderful innovations as per inputting Devnagri(Hindi) script is concerned. Due to its complexity, the Hindi based keyboards used today aren't user friendly at all. A beginner cannot think of using the same for text entry.
Interfacing the same to a touchscreen/stylus-input make it intuitive, and hence cut down the learning curve required to type hindi into Computers/cellphones.
Exactly as Shekhar says "I think this will benefit India because many people will be able to interact with computers for the first time in their life. "


The demo of the concept is downloadable here

Received the GSoC certificate

Finally I got my GSoC certificate of completion- huge thanks to my mentor Pawel Solyga(solydzajs) and Google Open Source Programs Office.
The Fedex shipping had twisted and crumpled and torn it a bit on the way to Googleplex to Delhi, a little trick called "lamination" helped it look as good as a new one ( atleast in the scanned image below). yay!

Alpha Tests

With the help of Soy Productions i could get a small demo video. Due to table configuration problems a good recording couldn't be done for now at my end. Soon our multitouch wall will be up and running.

Anyway,This is how camera manipulation would look as of now. Let's see if we come up with new ideas soon.

Task TBD- Make touch sensitive drawing and camera manipulation modes switch to each other. Waiting for friend- Pecan to arrive soon.