Most of you would know who Adnan is, if you have been watching TV around this days.

Here is his profile, incase you wish to put in your condolences: http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=14160249575654797975

A community dedicated to him

http://www.orkut.com/CommMembers.aspx?cmm=38032969&tab=0&na=3&nst=16&nid=0

But I am not going to talk about Adnan here. I was instigated to write this when I was watching this show Face the Nation hosted by Sagarika Ghose on CNN-IBN (one of the better news channels in India). The discussion of course started of with the host quoting some random blog post titled that “Orkut killed Adnan”. Duh!!! When I heard things spoken by the host during the discussion like “Should Orkut be banned?”, I felt outrageous, annoyed and eventually laughed out at shallow insight that some of our well groomed journos have about the Internet. They also listed down some other crimes like a Dope Party in Pune being organised on Orkut. The “Hate India” community on Orkut got much more popularity in newspapers then it ever had on Orkut users.

Read the rest of this entry »

Approximately a month back on 13th July, I attended the first ever National Conference on Open Source Software held in Ahmedabad organised by CII. Its a rage these days for techies to defy everything Microsoft. (Only till Gates looked after Windows, the world was a good place for MS). So, naturally the conference was jam-packed. India’s top advocates of OSS were there along with some “goras” from IBM and Mozilla. AMD, IBM and Red Hat being the organisers got a fair chance to promote themselves and pitch their products against the WINTEL dominated Personal Computing World. Prof Krishnan of MIT-Chennai, who runs NRCFOSS and Sivakumar of IIT Mumbai were humorous and made lighter presentations, but the most inspirational stuff came from Prof G. Nagarjuna of HBCSE and C. Umashankar of ELCOT both being radical believers of FOSS way of life. A video report showcasing Linux Usage Implementation at ELCOT has got me into thinking whether I too can help replicate that in my organisation (Ofcoure, I need to begin with my laptop first). Entrepreneurs like Atul Chitnis of Geodesic and Hardik Sanghavi of Vmukti were a delight for their ideas and products. Mozilla guys Seth and Chris rewarded the audience by mozilla goodies to some quick quizzes (I failed to get one), but their need for understanding us Indians as a Mozilla community is well-noted.

Ofcourse I feel more comfortable attending barcamps when it concerns technology, but then this was in Ahmedabad itself, so I could not miss this one. Hopefully, we will soon have a barcamp in Ahmedabad.

The training sessions arranged in next 2 days were a total flop(atleast for me). I hardly learnt nething hands-on about Drupal or Redhat, but did some networking with guys from OSS Resource Centre based out of IIT Mumbai and fellow geekies.