Whats up with Hatim!

I decided to volunteer for Fscons 2008 this year. This is my first open source conference and I thought that it would be a good idea to attend it as it was on a weekend and in the city of my residence. For friday 24th we were asked to attend a video streaing workshop (which I skipped), but I did help out with packing some bags, moving stuff around and then late at night attending the social event which was ok in the sense that it was a gathering of geeks (and there was free beer there too).

The second day for me started at 8:00. I attended few talks inclusing one on Cop5/Nagios. Good thing I was there to represent OpenNMS in the hall when some questions/comments were floated comparing OpenNMS, Nagios and other network monitoring tools. The whole day was rather slow for me in the free software developer section. But in the free software track there was this one talk by Denis Jaromil Rojo which really inspired me. He talked about freedom in software and freedom in general and how our future is going to be shaped by free software. Another talk which was worth listening to was the keynote The End of Free Communications? by Oscar Schwartz. He talked about how governments even such as the Swedish are trying to interfere with electronic lives of people and how this will tranlsate into future where every thing from voting to government, law enforcement will be done by use of technology. A fun part about his presentation was that he made sure to show us the pictures of all the "culprits" in Swedish parliment who have passed/supported these fascisist laws. He also suggested on how to combat this menace (by protests, activism, spreading awareness and ofcourse talking to your representitives)

Day 3 was a late start for me but it was more productive in technical terms. I attended various talks related to Debian, Postgres, KDE etc. But the highlight of the day for me was a work shop conducted by David Cuartielles of the arduino project. Arduino is a small Amtel chip based easy to use electornics prototyping platform meant for hobbyists and for learning purposes. It has its own programming language and a small IDE. I even bought my own board for 200 Kr and have plans to play with it in the near future.Here is the pic of my new board.

Overall the conference was a god experience for me. I met interesting people, learnt some new things and found passion for some previously known things (and I got a T-shirt).

I was asked to represent my company in Jitex 07 as a technical representative. For this I prepared my slef by going to ITCN Asia (which was not an amazing experience). I had tried to juggle the dates of Umrah so that I wont miss the first days of Jitex, but it was inevitible. After coming from Umrah, I hopped on to the next Air Blue flight ti Dubai. This was my first time travelling with Air Blue, and it reminded me of commercial Air Travle in rural USA where there are no goodies at all, and they just give you peanuts a juice.

When I arrived at Dubai airport I was not pleased to know that we would be going through terminal 2. Terminal 1 is the one with fancy duty free shop (so now I know why air blue is cheap, they don't have to pay extra for the nicer terminal). There was a long line of immigrant worked coming from Pakistan and India. I joined the queue and went through the ratina scan. After that went straight to immigration where the Arab immigration was flirting with a Pakistani passenger lady (so it took an extra while before it was my turn). Lucky me I had every thing as my hand luggage, so I got out and went straight to a cab. I was suppose to reach World Trade Center to the expo (it was around noon). I was coming to Dubai after 5 years so there was lots to see. First thing that I noticed was the under constuction, tallest building in the world. It is said that it can be visible to the nacked eye from alot of distance. The reality is that Dubai has so much mist all year long, it is hardly visible from mere 2 kilometers. But it sure is huge.

I arrived at the Dubai world trade center, contrary to my belief its not a sky scraper (I always confused it with emirates towers). I then called my supervisor who was already on the company's stall. He came out with my ID badge. GITEX is much bigger than ITCN as it focuses not only on IT but on consumer electronics as well. I went to my company's stall which was a subpart of PSEB's contingent. We were very incoventinetly placed in last of IT section, where as our focus area was Telecommunication companies which were in a whole another hall. First day was not suppose to be be long, but it felt otherwise. Later in the evening we went to our place of residence which was almost 20 km away from the trade center, (where tradecenter is already at the fringe of the city). A by product of Gitex is that there is virtually no suitable accomodation available in the Dubai area during exhibition days. Also one has to wait for very long hours to just get a taxi cab. Perhaps this situation would change one Dubai's intera-city train is up and running.

I stayed in Dubai for a period of 5 days. It was the first time I was on my own so went to all the places where I always wanted to go (ie. Emirates Shopping Mall for its Sking, to Sharja University to meet some old buddies and boating in the marina creek (on behind in the picture i am standing). All in all it was fun. Dubai is one good place to live (provided your income is alos g$$d). Any who I am looking forward to my next trip to Dubai. Hopefully by that time Burj-Al-Dubai will be complete and I will try to go to its top floor. 

[more on this later]