What's 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 came to Gothenburg on 25th only to attend some CIRC activities. CIRC is a volunteer organization here at Chalmers campus whose aim is to help international students adjust to Swedish/European culture. I have so far attended their Campus tour and Phadders evening (small silly fun and games with a senior student). I am planning to go to their city tour and to Leisberg park tour this weekend.