FOSS.IN Day 2 Report
FOSS.IN Day 2 Report
2005-12-01T08:28:00
I had wanted to attend Jonathan's talk on The Linux Kernel Roadmap, but arrived very late. I asked Vidyaraj and Unni to go and attend as many talks as possible while I would stay near the Phoenix stall to engage visitors. So Day 2 passed by without me attending any of the talks :-( Most of my time was spent simply hanging around the expo area and taking a few random photos.
The Phoenix stall is adjacent to the stall where Kanthi and friends were explaining the idea behind Free Software - they had put up some nice posters which tried to convey the Free Software ideology.
There were some interesting visitors to the Phoenix stall. One guy walked in and asked whether Phoenix is recruiting people - if so, he would like to drop his resume! Poor fellow took us to be a company doing embedded systems and hardware oriented work! Then there was this electronics guy who asked whether Phoenix works with Windows. I then preached the Free Software Philosophy to him and wound up my session by exhorting him to `Go, Cleanse your system of that evil stuff going by the name of Windows'. The fellow then said `how can I do it sir, I have a legally purchased copy of Windows - I paid good money for it'. I then asked him to atleast try running GNU/Linux on his machine and see whether he likes it.
A guy who was studying CS at IIT Madras came and told me he wanted to use Phoenix to `measure' things like the voltage in his room by first stepping it down to 5V using a transformer and then feeding it to Phoenix!!! He didn't want to do any kind of circuit stuff and wanted everything to be ready-made - he was willing to pay good money for that!
Krishna introduced me to a friend of his who was passionate about robotics and wanted to have a go at building the Phoenix kit himself. It was great talking to him.
There were some hi-tech visitors too. There was a guy who had worked at the Fermi Lab for seven years - I think he found the demo interesting.
As we were readying to close the stall, Praveen introduced me to a real Physicist - that was the highlight of the day. He was Dr.Vasant Barve, a retired Professor of mechanics. He showed great interest in the demo - as he started asking questions like `whether you can demonstrate the difference in swing when sin(theta) != theta ....' I told him that Physics was Greek to me and only Ajit Kumar, the designer of the kit, would be able to answer questions like that! He then talked about the Pasco kit which he said would be costing about 2 lakh rupees. He was developing a virtual laboratory software and was very much interested in the teaching of Physics.
Here are a few more photos (Python, Sun, IndLinux and Google stalls)
