travel

Last week all of us (#linux-india) gathered at JNU for Freed.in, the annual Foss conference organised by ilug-delhi. Spread over 2 days and dozens of talks, Freed.in turned out very well this year.

Many thanks to the entire Freed.in team and volunteers for the awesome hospitality (and the plentiful kebabs).

Pictures from Freed.in 2007

A week back, we went on to a trek to the Torna fort. Located about 40KM off from Pune on the Pune - Bangalore national highway, this place is well known for the enormous amount of flowers that blossom in this season(first to second week of september).

Reaching the base village is not too difficult if you have hired a vehicle. Once reaching the base village Velhe, it takes around 3 hours to reach the fort. The upward climb it not too difficult if the weather is calm and cloudy. The best time to go there is first and second week of September when the monsoon has just finished and the flowers start blossoming.

Awesome place really

I had a chance to see Netmagic the day before. Spread over 2 floors in Goregaon - Mumbai, its a mighty impressive data center. DD walked me through the server equipment running some of their high profile customers (like CNN-IBN, Cleartrip etc), 24x7 network operations center, backup power supply, fire control apparatus.

we're having march 2007 luggers meet at netmagic. see you all there

today morning i went to Siddhivinayak temple after couple of years. the whole outlook of temple has changed drastically in the past few years.

now there are walls, cops, metal detectors, snifer dogs all around... if you dont want to stand in loooong queues then you can get yourself silver or gold entry passes, or you can make a donation - which enables you a direct entry into temple... or if you are female, you can stand in the shorter ladies-only queue.

for the rest of us, well we can always stand in the general queue by which you get to enter the temple in 4 hours..

I reached bangalore the day before for attending Foss.in.. met several people here and mapped faces to their irc nicks and email addresses.

And guess who are the richest people in bangalore? No they are not infy and wipro guys, they happen to be the rickshaw drivers here.. They can come up with any random fare for your destination depending upon their mood and time of day.. i guess the GPG guys can learn a lesson or two on random number generation from them

I reached chennai yesterday evening for some work with AU-KBC. The city of white ambassador cars, chennai is much better off than bangalore.. roads are good, traffic is less and in control, though the city is flatter than mumbai, but then its cleaner(or did the driver take me through the cleaner parts of the city?)

anyway, am heading off for AU-KBC campus, though its raining outside

finally it seems my mobile computing kit is complete. there's a laptop, its battery charger, a usb mouse, headphones, 2 meter cross cable, tata indicom mobile internet connection, few ubuntu and few blank CDs, a marker, pen, a hand towel and a bag to hold all this junk.

am i missing something in my kit?

I was in Bangalore last week to attend 4th GPLv3 Conference at IIM-B. The volunteers from Bangalore had put in excellent efforts to make it a success. Personally i went to attend the conference, because Eben Moglen was speaking on the gplv3 draft threadbare.. This was also an opportunity to meet all the IRC nicknames and Mailing list email addresses in person

Talking about Bangalore, the city cannot be compared with Mumbai.. traffic there is a managed chaos. Birdwatchers have a hell of a time there.. try going to a mall instead..