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

 Stepping into Barcamp Bangalore for the 2026 Summer edition felt less like attending a conference and more like stepping into a nexus point where the future of technology converges with the deepest questions of the human condition. The energy was palpable, the ideas were revolutionary, and the sheer longevity of the event itself was a testament to Bangalore’s vibrant spirit. It was particularly moving to celebrate the milestone: 20 years of Barcamp Bangalore! Since its inception in 2006, Barcamp has not just been an event; it has been a crucible for innovation, community, and critical thought. The true magic of Barcamp lies in the diversity of its discussions. Here are some of the most profound takeaways from the sessions I attended: 1. Travel hacks for Vietnam and Southeast Asia - This session was an exploration of the experience with visiting counter culture in East Asia and its parallels with India. It was an eye-opening look at how shared cultural spaces—the casual interactio...

I have been part of Barcamp Bangalore for 9 years now and its been more like a part of my life. I have played many roles there, from keeping the website up, readying it for the next edition, making the Android App, sometimes acting like a product manager by telling others what to do and what not to, sometimes acting like a project manager by constantly keeping tabs on folks who have deadlines to keep, sometimes acting like a finance guy to takes care of sponsorships and expenses. It felt almost like running a bootstrapped startup where no one gets paid but gives you a different kind of satisfaction. Its been fun all these years working with so many different people that I dont want to name folks for the act of missing even one of them will be criminal on my part. But I must say, each one of the folks have taught me something and each have a quality I admire and try to build into my life ( but sadly sometimes I fail at it, obviously they are just so awesome) But this year I decided t...

Nine years is a long time. And being part of the planning team of Barcamp Bangalore has been a satisfying one for me. I have met so many people who have done such amazing stuff in their lives, each one of them taught me different things. The interacting experience with so many folks also taught me a lot.   This experience was practically like being a part of a startup where each member is a CEO,having equal responsibility and a say in how things work. Along with these learnings,  I also got to scratch my itch with various  technologies. I learnt PHP, Wordpress, MediaWiki, HTML5, Android, Python, Flask, Google App Engine among with various technologies that we tried to integrate into the event to make it smoother. I know it’s hard to keep things crisp, but here are some of my thoughts Never be afraid to put out your ideas and debate them : There are no geniuses in the world. Everyone thinks and often shoots down his own ideas for very silly reasons. Often t...

I learnt about Barcamp Bangalore sometime in June or July 2007. I was fascinated by the idea of sharing ideas, learning about technology and talking about them as well. I attended a large lot of talks on both the days that it was there. I dont remember what all talks I attended, but they were not tied to any one technology or aspect at all. Plus everyone had equal rights to talk and you need not be that well known guy to talk about something you are passionate about. That was the best part of the entire event according to me. Post event, I joined the yahoo mailing list and after a few days there was this call for anyone interested in planning the next one. I was excited to be part of it. A naive idiot, just a couple of years out of college, I thought wow, this going to be something. Then at the planners meet there were a lot of folks. But I remember Arun Ram, Hari, Jace a.k.a. Kiran(I found out that day), Srinivas and Keshav . I felt awesome to be able to contribute som...

Barcamp Bangalore is one of those events which I just wait for. Its a time when I rejuvenate my thought process which is drained thanks to the often hectic work at office. Also this is one place where geeks can feel at home and talk about anything under the sun. Its pretty cool that its not just Tech thats discussed but also other topics close to us, like politics and life. Like most times, the paper wiki was filled completely as soon as it was put up. I actually saw a few people going disappointed with not being able to put up their talk. And like most other times, it started with the intro session for the first timers. This time it was Pradeep BV taking charge and explaining it to the first timers, what barcamp is all about. After that it was realized that one of the four rooms were actually not available for Barcampers. Anyways another great thing that happened was that an Impromptu Sessions paper wiki was put up. Amazingly it too was filled in a matter of minutes, it was put up...

Barcamp Bangalore 7 is here again. Because of the crazy times at work, I have not updated by blog for a long time. I dont know if I will be able to do it in the next few weeks also. But I wish I could. One thing is for sure that I am going to Barcamp and it will be a good time. Startup Saturday is happening at the same place and the same time. Its the very same ppl who were organising Barcamp Bangalore who are behind it. I am still wondering what made them move to a conference like event rather than an unconference. Anyways its for me to find out in the next few days. I am looking forward to a session by @mataal on Process vs Thread. Another one if by Ujjwal on how to chase your dream project while keeping your day job. I am sure a few more interesting things will pop up, as always. Anyways I am also leading a discussion on ELearning and what it hold for us in the future. I hope that I will have some interesting people to talk over it.

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...

Wow this was something I did not expect. But this surely did hit me hard the first time I got through it. It seems like I could access most Airtel Broadband users routers using simple telnet. Once I was connected, all that was required was username and password. Boy and I am in. I have access to the router now and I sure can do a lot of crazy stuff with it. Wait a minute, did I say you need username and password. How would I get the username and password. Well actually not very difficult. Is it. No one ever changes the username and password of their router. Actually no one expects anyone to be able to access the router without their knowledge. But the sad fact is, anyone on the internet can access their router. Most people do not even realize that their internet connection can be easily compromised. How? Well simple steps to follow 1. Press Window Key + R  to open the Run Command Dialog 2. Press cmd (Enter) 3. Enter 'telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx' Where 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...

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 . Anyways gurus Akash and Cruisemaniac aka Ashwin were always there. After some loitering met a few people who were interested in my idea of BuddyHe...

Well if India is diverse its so because of the people. Barcamp is for, with, by people and no wonder you had the ultimate kind of diversity in it. You had lawyers, CA, MBA, profs, CEOs, coders, developers and geeks (yes they are different) among various other people. It was an awesome mix of ideas and people. The planners met some time back and we had a lot of discussion over how to do things this time around. I was a yet another experiment. Thankfully it came out good. If there is anything to complain about, it probably is the content. But friend isnt content something that has to come from us, the junta. I had been planning for some sort of an open source project. I thought BCB would be a great place to find people. But sadly it did not turn out the way I wanted. No hands to join in for the project. But anyways I did get some feedback on the objectives of my BuddyHere . I did take another session on Hacking Canon compact camera to provide extra features. I will be writing a post ...

The barcamp movement has taken India  by storm and Bangalore has now become the center of this movement in India. I think it was Barcamp Bangalore where it all started and now its in its 6th edition. I was introduced to it in the 4rth edition. I liked the concept at the very first. It was very clear that everyone is equal. You would be admired based on not what you are but what you deliver. So if someone is talking crap, you can just walk out. True there were a lot of freeloaders out there who came to do nothing actually. I was supposed to be one but then I realized that I too could talk. Well not technical but the I could speak about "How the bloggers are affecting other professionals". I thought this was the beauty of Barcamp. You could discuss anything under the sun. When the next barcamp was being planned and call was made for other to chip in, I decided to go ahead for it. Sadly I could not attend the Barcamp because of personal reasons but I could not attend it. ...

Well this is an idea that I would like to share with all so that my dream can be realized. So here is the idea. Now that we have mobiles with GPS we should make use of it. So now you have this messenger which would update your position in your IM every time you move over 100m or something. I am assuming that either the GPS now or sooner will be accurate to something like few meters. So when you have some of your friends around, you know that they are. Cool dont u think? Here are options to make it happen. 1. Send update about the location to all/selected your buddies. Pro: Simple and effective Cons: No Privacy and your exact location is known to all. 2. Server gets updates and it pings you about friends close to you Pro: Agains simple and effective Cons: Requires server services. You location data is on a central server and this is a possible privacy risk. 3. Each person broadcasts a location to all his friends which is nearly correct. Now this nearly is something deb...

The First Innovation Camp or iCamp Bangalore for short happened in Bangalore on 23rd Feb 2008 at Mindtree Consultings office at Banashankari. Here is how it unfurled to me. 09:30hrs := Registered and I am in 10:00hrs := I am in the room for intro of Barcamp Concept, given by Murali. Some rules etc. A lot less ppl compared to my expectations and NO WI-FI to connect to :-( 10:13hrs := Henry Jacob start with design driven development. Surely its true for IT Industry, Innovate or Die. (SCO, Sybase etc are examples of that) Some interesting concept for Design Foundation,  Games and Cube. Key points Innovate to hasten, eliminate jobs,  A god system should eliminate existing tasks, speed up tasks, save money, time and make ppl fall in love. Hot discussion on whats innovation and what design is on. I believe he was going on a good track and like many other presentations at Barcamp this too got lost somewhere. 10:40hrs := now we come to some conclusion. Basically it is clear ...

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...

Devamp Bangalore happened yesterday and I was there to witness the event. It was a real cool place to be in first place. A real gathering of geeks. You could hear people talking passionately about the semantic web, AIR, mobile technologies, JSON and many others. You could see ppl blogging or working with their laptop. It turned out to be a wonderful event. I had shortlisted 5 sessions to watch out for, and I am happy that out of those 2 were really cool, Microformats and Semantic Web and Clutter. Microformats and Semantic Web talked about poshzone, which is an acronym for Plain Old Simple HTML zone. More details here . Clutter is a new Library which is a wrapper around OpenGL and OpenGL ES. It allows you to do the same cool stuff with a lot smaller code that you could achieve by coding endlessly in OpenGL. Its a new thing which is coming up and we should collaborate and work on developing it further. The best part is that it can run on the mobile platforms as well. Another cool t...

Devcamp Bangalore is another attempt to have a good unconference style developers conference. But I feel its been plagued by several issues. I am writing it today because I did not want to generate negative publicity around an event which could have been one of the bridges for moving of Indians from coding coolies to tech giants. Still there were certain things which made me doubtful of the motive of the event. I am post now about it because there are only a few hours left for the event to start and I am going to attend it. But these are something which the organizers on their part must make sure does not happen. First thing is, probably this event was there because Martin Fowler was coming to Bangalore. He is being treated as the chief guest. His topic too is yet to be decided. In true Barcamp spirit, this does not happen. I dont know if Martin Fowler is driving this camp or the campers themselves. The event homepage at one point of time had link to a post by a gentleman who had ...

I had attended Barcamp Bangalore 4. I liked the concept and decided that I will probably help out organize next time around, considering that its open to all. The old timers were really happy to get us on board. But the spoiler for me is the fact that I would have had been out of town on the days Barcamp was schedules. Having taken the dip in the organizing it, it was very much clear that whether I attend or not, let me just help if there is no one. I dont know if I was of any help or not, but I did argue a lot on a lot of matters. I hope that this Barcamp will again generate the enthusiasm and interest in people to do something beyond. There will be some technologies to be understood and some nuance to be cleared. So guys see in the next Barcamp, Hopefully .

Finally we have the registrations open for Barcamp Bangalore 5. As usual its through the wiki here . You are requested to enter in the format specified. For wiki entry enter in following format # Name , Blog/Website, Organisation, Email Id, '''Collectives: Primary:'''ABC '''Others: '''XYZ I hope this is going to be the most liveliest of all barcamps happening around the world, the Baap of all Unconferences.

Well the registration for the collectives have began. If you think there is some topic to be discussed at barcamp, then go ahead and register. Here is how to do that.   http://barcampbangalore.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4 But before that I feel everyone must read this http://barcampbangalore.org/wiki/BCB5_Collective_Approach It explains you about what to expect from Barcamp and Collectives. Really its been written in an excellent manner by Shourya Sarcar . A must read for all Barcampers new and old timers both.