considering a switch to mac...

this was eventual, i had to succumb someday, my plan to switch to mac

and as always the promise of a new model holds the decision, looks like apple is going to launch an ultra portable during january, can i wait or should i take the plunge and pick a macbook pro

its so strange how we can complicate our lives so much...

reading today...

samsonite baby travel - design competition

understanding actionscript virtual machine

field guide to style and color

day 2 went really well

well the bcb5 is over now, day 2 went quite well, personally i had more to learn than yday, the crowd had thinned a little, groups had fewer people but the discussions were intense. people started coming in around 9:30, first I met prashant who was presenting on social shopping, he runs storrz.com (an online shopping mall mixed with social networking features), its quite an interesting concept, they are planning to launch a closed beta version soon, the store is already functional, there are bunch of merchants like namdhari's and cookie man hooked up and the best part is you can even pay by sodexho meal passes, i am going to try their service this week, will post more on that

slowly the rooms were getting booked, people were skeptical about post-lunch sessions on a sunday and the impending india pakistan cricket match, so the morning sessions were hot, while they were battling it out for time I caught up with abhishek from webaroo. he does designing work and was presenting on usability and sms gupshup, he pointed couple of cool stuff they are working on, there is a search service called search radar, which creates a cloud tag as well as list view of associated terms for any search string, it is still in beta and they a firefox extension, the next one was wikislice, a new way to browse and capture information from wikipedia, user can search for a string and wikislice displays that particular article as well as all the outgoing links from that page and user can download all of it in a compressed package, abhishek is a real funny guy, you should have heard his experience of watching a telugu version of sivaji, the boss without any subtitles- he is newly turned rajinikanth fan

one of the good sessions i attended on day1 was extreme programming and introduction to agile methodology, naresh jain was presenting the second part to it on test driven development, refactoring and pair programming, i ended up missing those yday, he was kind enough to go through the topic just for me and one more guy ajay. naresh used to work for thoughworks and is an independent consultant now working with companies on agile implementations and design workshops, he is a real smart chap, he also moderates the india agile forum. in this session he walked us through some slides introducing the concept of tdd, refactoring and acceptance testing. we worked on a simple stack implementation to understand how do you go about writing tests before developing anything, eye opening to say the least. naresh contributes to an open source acceptance testing framework fitnesse, he showed us a quick demo of it, there is a little nifty feature which lets the users insert rows and columns directly from browser, its a very impressive tool. right after this there was just some open discussions which extended well over lunch and beyond. it was fun watching naresh and mrinal debating about the level of importance that's given for interface and all that jazz that's done in flex/flash.

the challenge of choosing the collective for afternoon was even more difficult, everyone knows that its the last day and would want to extract the best use of time, i planned to attend a critical feedback session of taazza.com by arunram, he was seeking feedback and how people perceived news websites, this was a really interactive session, looks like they have used ruby on rails for development, its a new way of consuming news and i think they are doing a great job, hoping to see some of the feedback implemented soon

while i was at this session, i ended up missing designfest, mobile applications development, information technolgy in schools, how to organize the next barcamp and many more, one of the biggest learnings from my first bar camp experience is to talk to as many people as possible, understand what they are doing and why they are doing it in a specific way, overall i couldn't have asked for more, will be eagerly looking forward to the next meet

~ great job organizers of bcb5 ~

Labels: barcampbangalore, barcampbangalore5

day 2, barcamp5 bangalore

am driving down the campus, no long parking queues, not too many people walking around, where is the buzz, there's frickin nobody here, looks like the party ran late yday. well I will spend the next one hour meditating, ok, i mean i will go have breakfast...will talk more about that later..

Labels: barcampbangalore, barcampbangalore5

discovery for the day

atlantis computing - its an extension over vmware hypervisor and offers application aware virtualization (which I guess means, virtualization of the windows + applications running on them). their platform is called atlantis unity and is available in three flavors (desktop, avanced, enterprise). they have offices in palo alto and bangalore. this company was mentioned over lunch at bcb5

bangalorefx.org - its a google group of about 30 people from bangalore to discuss on various topics related to flex. i got the lead while attending bcb5

funambol - i just got a short peek into this at a session today in bcb5, just checked out what i missed, this is an open source alternative for blackberry like solution (mail, calendar, address book)

Labels: barcampbangalore5, discovery

barcamp5 bangalore, winter edition

today was the first day of barcamp5 bangalore, winter edition and my first experience in being in such a gathering. there was quite a crowd, well I think I spent the day well, meeting some smart people, learning a stuff or two in technology, and sensing a spirit of entrepreneurship

the venue was really good, but a place you could get really lost, infact there were many posters by the organizers, claiming they were lost too, and not to worry about it, now that's a relief

good part of the morning was spent in breakfast, setting up wifi, exchanging names and interests, memorizing types of coffee (the rooms were espresso, latte, doppio, cappucino, ristretto, machiato and matz - the mattresses), decorating self with stickers, lugging some mattresses for seating and deciding which collective to stick to (never thought this would be a tough decision, but believe me it was)

I attended two sessions, one pre-lunch and another post-lunch. the first session was about extreme programming by Aman King from thoughworks, it was quite interactive, finally got a hang of the terms like stories, burndown charts, velocity charts, swim line but still clueless about how I would apply such a methodology at work. the second session was on Flex and AIR by Mrinal Wadhwa from SAP, this was one of the session I was looking forward too, due to some newly inspired idea. wasn't disappointed at all, had some technical take away and got introduced to the flex bangalore group (seems to be quite active)

at the end picked a t-shirt of the event, grabbed a latte (not the room, the drink) and set home, for once I was not swearing and was taking time in the slow bangalore traffic to think about the day and all the learning, its the feeling that you just got a little wiser at the end of the day, feels nice

the event continues tomorrow and its going to be as interesting if not better, I plan to attend a collective on Semantic web by Harish Kumar, the rest will be impromptu

overall a great experience, and a reason to give "blogging regularly" another shot....

Labels: barcampbangalore, barcampbangalore5