My takeaways from Barcamp Bangalore 6

Its always been that one post for Barcamp Bangalore is not enough. Its always that I have had multiple posts. This one could not be an exception. I not being an RIA fanboy did not care to attend the marathon hijack sessions on it. Neither did I care to attend Myspace thing. I kind of hated the fact that those RIA guys did not care but take a room for themselves for the entire time after lunch. Not that I did not like it happening but would have loved if there were people talking about other things also. After all this was not an RIACamp.

Anyways there were these interesting parallel sessions which happened. Among the first which I attended was Blogathon India. Me being an planner for Blogathon India started the session. Later it was taken over by Sanjukta. Next I preceded to help people with their wifi connections to the extent I could Happy. Anyways gurus Akash and Cruisemaniac aka Ashwin were always there. After some loitering met a few people who were interested in my idea of BuddyHere. This was probably one of thing which made me feel that probably my idea can take off as an OSS App. But then I am still as much confused about how to do it as I was before.

One thing that felt really good was when I saw a guy put labels on the Tea and coffee containers. Before that everyone was asking someone else which is which. But this guy just took the post-it notes and pasted them over the containers. After all its your barcamp. Please feel free to do anything. Now that the spirit of Barcamp.

There was this talk on saving Nanda which tried to come up with solutions. Ways to prevent the awesome trees which are there on the beautiful Nanda Road but very soon they will be chopped off to make way for the Namma Metro. But isnt it a bit too high price. It was good to meet such enthusiastic people.

Akash took a session on how to secure your ever vulnerable Windows XP with free software. No doubt that windoze is inherently a lousy OS as far as security is concerned. So the best way is to make sure we use Firefox with NoScript plugin. Another thing is to not install anything. Another interesting thing that he talked about was to disable all plugins in IE. Because if may not be IE but some other s/w which uses IE for internet be the source of problem. Sure to keep ur comp secure you can use virtualisation software too, but what about the data was the question Akash said to one of the participants. I think it was good learning from Akash about all the simple ways to prevent an attack on your PC.

Among the sessions worth mentioning were the legal aspects of Voip, SaaS and Horoscope-- Truth or Fake. It was interesting to know from the session by Rajeev that Voip is not allowed in India. All the while I thought its been made legal now. But it seems that its still illegal and we pay a hell lot of money for it. All in name of security but actually to save the VSNL from incurring losses. He is has created a community, a google group at http://groups.google.com/group/voiceofvoip. Let work towards making VoiP legal in India.

SaaS is sort of a buzzword today. But the fact is something that I know nothing of. The only thing that I can think of as SaaS  is Google Docs and similar services. I was introduced to the term, multitenent Database and SaaS for large corporations. Now thats something new.

I think this is very much what took from the last barcamp. I hope there is more of knowledge shower in the next one too.

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