Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

Contd from here (I am sorry but I am really drowning in work right now ) Ok after lunch it was time for another round of sessions. This time there were supposed to be some parallel session. This meant you win some, you loose some. But its fine with barcamps. To make sure people are awake, alive and kicking, Anil, COO, Aditi Technologies, dumped his usual upper level management fundas and let loose a volley of Shayaris, with a twist. I sorry I dont recall any(Ya its been a long time too ) Next in line was Aashish Solanki a.k.a. Net Bramha with an interesting topic, Art and Science of Web Design. It was more of discussion. Some interesting points were Differentiate between structure and skin. Something which is good for you might not be good for others. Getting their requirements is important. An interesting comment from Aashish was "IE is the Labour Pain of Web Development". Why well, most of you time goes in checking if the page is render...

It was time again DCamp or Design Camp Bangalore.  Amit Pande, Sarit, Muthu , Anil Gupta among others worked hard to get this event going. I must tell you that I had an awesome time there. The presentations there were truly awesome. Let give a short summary of the things as they happened at the DCamp, though Vinodhn already has kind of everything on twitter . So heres how the event unfolded for me. I happily landed and Mekhri Circle expecting Aditi's office to be close by. So I begin walking from there towards Cauvery Circle. Cool I was looking for directions and I see someone looking at me from an auto. Oh ok I recognize this guy, hmmm....ok he is Gilberto from Thoughworks. Fine he is going to DCamp but is lost and does not know where is it happening. Ok fine I said, let walk to towards the Aditi Office and let so we walk. A few meters down the road, there is Muthu and Sudhindra at the gate of Aditi. So next thing we do is register and head for the terrace where the event was ha...

Well as I have been observing Camps happening all the time. Its like they are happening dime a dozen. We had Barcamp Bangalore. DCamp Bangalore was introduced later. Kamp was one more even to add to the list. Then suddenly some techies join forces for Devcamp . Now I see iCamp (Innovation Camp) in sight. Cool stuff happening. But then isn't it a little too much. Actually to come to think of it. Most of those are in their first inning. I wish they go into their centennial editions. Infact India need more of these camps. The camp phenomenon has hit the Kashmir Valley too. So the fever is finally catching on. I really loved the discussion at Devcamp which talked about a lot things. Most make no sense to me but some did. I am sure there were other who took home more than what I did. I heard there is this OSSCamp which also happens regularly in Delhi atleast. So its clear that Barcamp fever has gripped India big time. So what next. Well next step is converting this mo...

5th November(instead of 8th because of Diwali) was celebrated as World Usability Day. Bangalore was not untouched by the phenomenon, though it would rather had been a major thing. But clearly with over 120(My guess) it was not ignorable event. Long time since the usability aspects have been ignored by the technologists. iPhone and iPod have clearly shown the way. They were nothing radical in concept but they infact radically changed the usability part of the respective equipments. I must add here that I was late for the event. But none the less I did have the opportunity to hear Mr MP Ranjan on Designing. His take on the Design for the user and design in various fields. Pretty much the whole talk is online at his blog http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/ . But it was real experience to hear it from the horse's mouth. Next Sarit from HFI presented the findings of usability test of Indian Railways Online reservation site at http://www.irctc.co.in/ . Ironically it was the awarde...

With so many things happening for the engineers Bar Camp, OCC and now D Camp . Sure we are going to see the next MS or Google from India very soon. D Camp or design camp was held a Yahoo office in EGL. First presentation was by Muthu from Sun Microsystems. He started with demo on how to use CSS and Javascript. Next how to use it to get ' Your Kind' of a look for your webpage. Then we had the demo for YUI Javascript Library. And the usual corporate bashing was kicked off but Muthu cleverly moved the controversy out by saying that YUI is his favourite thats all and the ultimate call to use is on the developer themselves. Joe Arnold from Yahoo! was next to make a presentation with an unusual title " Learning to Fly ". Rather actually it was a great one. Interesting way to explain how to design, using the Wright brothers experience on how to build invent a plane. Some interesting thought on what it takes to build or rather invent a good product. You need ...