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...

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...

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 ...

If it was the newspapers which gave the power to the freedom fighters, its going to be the blogs which will give power to the us in fighting injustice so prevalent in the society. It would not be the voice of one or two people but the collective voice of hundred thousands whose voice will shake the blogosphere. The media as we see today is open to manipulation and more often not carrying the voice of the people. Blogathon is an attempt to unify the voice of 6 billion Indians. Together we shall talk about issues which affect us and society in general. Lets come together and talk about it. Its happening in the blogosphere from 20th to 26th April 2008. Each day the blogosphere will be talking about a particular topic. They are out now Infrastructure: Sunday, 20th April 2008 How can we improve the traffic condition in our city? Politics : Monday, 21st April 2008 How do we change the focus of politics from caste/religion to grassroot issues? Entertainment: Tuesday, 22nd Apr...

For those who do not follow news or anything let me point you to his blog . First of all he has this terrible Web 0.0 type of blog which basically sucks. Add a dash of the usual dramatics and you have a super blog. Super not because its good or thoughts are good but there a fan following of his. Thats the only reason I could see why anyone would follow his life force sucking blog. I had great respect for this guy until he wrote this post. I thought he was different when he came in support of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. He was very right. But now he has made monstrous decision. HE HAS DECIDED TO GO AHEAD WITH OLYMPICS TORCH RELAY. Wow when the world realizes to protest something we have a supporter in India other than the spineless mindless communists. I was rather happy with BJP in this regard, at least they showed some spine. Lets examine some of the finer points which Mr Khan had to make. I would like to state that I have the highest regard and respect for the struggle that th...

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 it all started with a small revolution called Mobile Monday, Bangalore . It was an initiative of some minds behind the mobile technology in Bangalore(Keshav, S R Raja, Rajan & Rajiv). It was actually a success. The reason behind the success of the Mobile Monday has been its unique concept. The community meets every 3rd Monday of the month. They have a set agenda and people with passion. So much so that many communities in Bangalore are planning to adopt a similar approach. Like all good things he success of this has lead into a next step, which make use of Saturday. Now what rhymes best with Saturday, well one of thing is Startup. So here we have Startup Saturday . An interesting concept building momentum. What I expect next is the following, Testers Tuesday, Web Wednesday, UX Thursdays, FOSS Friday, Startup Saturday and finally Sleepy Sunday. Guys at least Sunday deserves a break :-) Anyways I dont see this thing not materializing. For a very simple reason, the community ...

There is surely something about Barcamp Bangalore. It keeps on changing. The people driving it are always changing. Newer ideas keep pouring in. Discussion on those keep on happening. There are people who are always whining about things that are not right in Barcamp. Well the only thing I can say after meeting the guys working behind Barcamp Bangalore is that they are very open to ideas. But then some people are always there to complain. Probably thats a property(I am getting geeky nowadays) we inherit as Indians? That question mark is there because I am not sure. But the fact remains we have people coming in who are there because they like this kind of an event. They have an idea on how it should be done. So whats new in this barcamp? well as I read from the mail Akash to BCB Mailing list, the Barcamp Bangalore wiki is open for all. There are no registrations. Only way you can register is by either being a speaker, volunteer or letting other know in specific, what u want to know abo...

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 ...

Whats started as a small idea in the last Blogalorean Meet, snowballed into a big one during the mailing group discussions. Finally it was planned that all interested people would meet at Koshy's on a fine Saturday evening. It was 19th of Jan around 4:30 that I entered Koshy's to find five of them there, busy discussing and finalizing how it should be done. I jumped into that whole thing and soon their infectious enthusiasm got into me. After some random bakwas of mine. Then that waiter was like pushing us out. So last round of discussion happened across the street on the footpath. Finally we decided on something which were worded right by Sandil and put up on the Big Bangalore Blogathon . There are still a lot of things to be done for it. I am right now not in Bangalore to be physically involved but will be providing all possible support virtually and ofcourse by blogging during the Blogathon. I hope this event generates a lot of positives. Some of the people working behind th...

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 .

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...

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 heads rolled this weekend again on what should be the Barcamp Bangalore 07 Winter Edition. A lot of hot debates and responsibilities being shared between people. Sponsorship, marketing, logistics etc being taken up. Besides these a few fundamental principles were formed for Barcamp Bangalore 07 Winter Edition. Firstly Collective based approach was to be repeated. Yes there was a hot debate on it with people getting into each others point well. In the end it was decided to continue with the "Collectives" Experiment. Second should we restrict Barcamp to Tech only. Last Barcamp had gone beyond that. There were collectives like photography, biking and unband. Certain participants felt that this was diluting the whole atmosphere from being a bleed-edge tech discussion forum to a milder, do-all discussion forum. So it was finally decided that we should make a Barcamp a forum to create a ecosystem where multi-disciplinary activities take place. I wish to see some new ag...

Barcamp kickoff meet was there at India Coffee House at MG Road. I reached there just in time to find the Barcamp regulars Arun, Hari, Jace a.k.a. Kiran(I found out that day), Srinivas and Keshav among others whom I kind of met for the first time. Since I was there before others could join in, I had a little chit-chat with them. One thing was clear to me at that time, Collectives or no Collectives would be the hot topic. Soon more people joined us, among those who I remember are Vinoo, Manasi and Kiruba. Well actually there were too many to remember and without the list from Hari I dont think I can recall all names :-( Another important mention that I would make here is Aditya who joined us on phone. Well as I had predicted Collectives or no Collectives drove the discussion. Most of us made it amply clear that collectives are required but we need to buck up the communications part. Another suggestion was to make the collectives instead of folder like, make them tag like. But frankl...