Nithin Kamath's Weblog

Atul Chitnis introducing Philip Tellis at FOSS.in 2009

The 2009 edition of FOSS.in came to an end yesterday and this was my first experience attending such a big conference. So how was my experince? All I can say is that I was totally blown away by the spirit, dedication and enthusiasm of the people who were a part of FOSS.in. I salute all the people who made FOSS.in such a memorable experience.

For a first timer like me being at such a event can be a bit overwhelming, but thanks to Laxminarayana Kamath I got to meet up with lot of people right from Baiju, Santosh, Debayan, Sham, Tony, Ankur, Deepak, Anil, Hardik, Vignesh and lots more…sorry folks I am not able to mention all your names but I sure remember you.

FOSS.in has lots of talks and workouts, I attended a few of them and to sum them all up I would quote what Philip Tellis had quoted in his ‘Shut up and hack’ keynote “Have Itch, Scratch”, that is what the conference is all about and the tag line of the event ‘Show me the code’ is justified. If you were at the workouts and seen the number of them this year you could have understood what the Itch can do.

One more thing that made this years FOSS.in special and convinient was that it was held at NIMHANS Convention Center with three auditoriums for talks, one whole floor for the workouts – WOW! Thats how it should be.

So I will wrapup this quick writeup on FOSS.in 2009 with a BIG Thank You to the Team FOSS.in for organising such a big event in such a smooth manner.

April 30th was the third phase of the on going Lok Sabha elections in India and the second and the final phase of the polling in Karnataka. I had to take a leave off from my office (polling was complete in Bangalore the previous Thursday (23rd) itself) and goto Mangalore to cast my vote.

This was the third or the fourth time I cast my vote, the last being a year and a half back for the by-elections. Due to the delimitation process my area moved from Ullal constituency to Dakshina Kannada. There were 11 contestants who were in the running out of which seven were independents.

I went around 9:30 am and was able to cast my vote in around 10 minutes. I hear that at a few places people had to wait for a long time (about a hour or so) before they would cast their votes. Overall the percentage of people who voted in Dakshina Kannada (DK) was the highest in Karnataka – 74%.

One of the reasons I could see for this was the May 1st holiday. Lots of Mangalorean people have now moved out of Mangalore and are working in other cities like Bangalore. Taking a leave on 30th for voting would have given them an extended four day weekend and it looks like most of them utilised it cleverly.

A couple of weeks still to go before the counting starts lets hope the best candidate wins and we have a stable government at the centre.