Colin Charles Agenda

foss.in is officiated. Atul is on stage, speaking and the room is filled up. The lighting ceremony happened, a while ago. “Only an Indian can give a keynote, at foss.in” - here comes the Anjuta keynote, by Naba Kumar. History of Anjuta? The name, was the name of his girlfriend, and now, its his wife (they have a cute daughter, whom we got to see at Opus last night).

Last night quite a number of us went to the Opus, for a Mozilla party. It was truly, a hip event. Lots of beer, lots of chatter, and there was even some local Indian scotch towards the tail-end of the night. We were having so much fun, we didn’t even realise dinner wasn’t around yet ;) Aizat and I wolfed down some amazing pasta in under 5 minutes around 11pm.

Kudos to Shreyas and Shilpa for ensuring we were all safe and sound (and Kishore who sent me home, since I missed the bus :P). It was great to speak with Tejas, Allen, Gopal and the rest of the crew.

Yesterday, spent some time in Juergen Schmidt’s talks in the OpenOffice.org Project Day. I tailed into another talk about translations in Kerala, who seemed to represent the government of Kerala to some extent. Translations alone don’t interest me, but finding out more about FOSS use in Kerala clearly does. I am after all, a Mallu ? I hope I got that right :)

Jumped to see Tom Callaway speak about Fedora Secondary Architectures, though there are some things there that I feel are a little incorrect with the idea behind it. Build machines, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Packages and the distribution itself, save for the torrents, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Allowing a build of software to fail on a secondary architecture? Wrong. Allowing the secondary arch maintainer to fix broken packages? Smart. Though honestly, I think this might end up having to becoming a team.

Rahul Sundaram’s talk about spins was great. Considering I was building LiveCDs before there were tools, to do so, I’m glad that there are so many ways to do so now (easily, even). And of course chit chatting with him over beer at the Opus later, was fun.

Anyways, time to pay attention to the Anjuta talk. Not a big fan of IDEs myself, but I’m seeing the need for it (for folk that aren’t comfortable with vim).

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, opus, party, fedora, openoffice.org, secondary architectures, livecd

Yesterday, my agenda was around the Mozilla Day - spent most of the morning, listening to Mozilla-related extension talks. I ran away the moment they talked about accessibility and localisation, and spent some time in the Hack Centre, which was just tables, chairs, WiFi and good hacking :) Then hopped into the GNOME project day, to listen to Ritesh Khadgaray tell us about how to hunt bugs. I continued spending the rest of my day there, for what its worth.

Dinner, at MG Road. Wonder if there are other locations to eat? I mean, I’ve extensively walked around the MG Road area, around Brigade Road, Church St, and so on.

Today, I’m going to jump between the OpenOffice.org and Fedora project days, both of which are projects close to my heart.

Of the 2,700+ registered jokers, the project days certainly seem a lot smaller than I’d have expected… Under-1000 attendees maybe? I guess this will pick up certainly during the main conference.

Photo by aizat

WiFi works wonderfully well at the conference. I’m actually shocked! Has to be one of the few conferences that have got Internet access working. Maybe I should knock wood in case this disappears soon…

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, project days

Ever since getting the Sandisk Sansa e280 (yes, so much better than the iPod Nano, if you must know), I’ve been interested in the Voice recording feature. I fiddled with it today, to give it a bit of a test, as I plan on conducting audio interviews.

Once recorded, it outputs WAV files. This is easily accessible in Linux, in the RECORD folder. So I played around with converting the original WAV file into an OGG and MP3. Quick findings:

• WAV:  RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 16000 Hz size at 1020K
• OGG: Ogg data, Vorbis audio, mono, 16000 Hz, ~48000 bps, created by: Xiph.Org libVorbis I, sized at 148K, converted via oggenc 071203_01.wav -o 071203_01.ogg
• MP3: MPEG ADTS, layer III, v2,  24 kBits, 16 kHz, Monaural, sized at 104K, converted via lame 071203_01.wav

This was on a clip that was 32 seconds in length. The MP3 is smaller than the OGG, and there’s no noticeable sound difference between all the 3 formats. Is there something to make the OGGs generated by oggenc smaller? I’m happy if they just match the MP3 file sizes, to be honest.

Time to start podcasting? :)

Technorati Tags: ogg, wav, mp3, size, sansa e280, sandisk, oggenc, lame