Quizzing – Page 6

OSSCamp Delhi 2009

OSSCamp Delhi was held at NSIT Dwarka on 5-6 September 2009. OSSCamp is an unconference on open source software, technologies, and ideologies, one of the largest events related to open source in India. Even as I was travelling by Delhi Metro to NSIT Dwarka on the morning of the first day of the event, I met a guy from NSIT who was going for the same. (He figured I might be heading there too since I was wearing the ILUG-D t-shirt.) Met Kinshul Sunil outside NSIT’s administration building; he works as a community manager at a company called OSSCube, which is in the field of open source software development / training / support. Kinshuk oversees a lot of the organizational details of the event and even with this being a community-driven event a lot of credit must be given to him for managing the event so well. Was handed a name tag; designed by Yadu Rajiv. (Yeah, I know it looks like a name tag for a Rage Against The Machine concert, but they probably don’t use name tags.) Also met other people at the start of the day – Mohak Prince, Sachin Khosla, Ankur Sethi, Apoorv Khatreja, Udit Agarwal, Triveni Yadav, Sanchit Gulati, Anshu Verma.

By 10-10.30am (of day 1) we had quite a respectable crowd of 142 people (I kid you not) assembled in the NSIT Delhi auditorium. The event kicked off with Kinshuk giving a short introduction to OSSCamp. Lalit then urged audience members to give jadoo ki jhappi [which made Lalit (in?)famous] to each other and we had a small-scale free hugs campaign going on for a while (only a handful of the audience participated). The talks started in earnest then. I won’t be going into the details of the talks since they have already been live-blogged on the NSIT CSI society blog – check it out for a short summary of sessions held (a few held at the end of day 2 are missing).

During the sessions, what Mohak Prince and I noticed was that every speaker mentioned licencing, but didn’t go further into nitty-gritties. We had quite a few first-timers to open source this time who seemed thoroughly confused by this talk of licenses, so we both decided to give a session on Creative Commons licenses. Unfortunately, NSIT administration hadn’t given us permission to set up a WiFi network, and their own WiFi network had been shut-down ever since Ankit Fadia had scared the living daylights out of NSIT faculty, post 26/11 Mumbai attacks. We both were trying to find a presentation to aid our talk so we borrowed a laptop with a Reliance data card from someone and searched out a suitable presentation. We scheduled the session post-lunch.

Me, at OSSCamp. Damn, those chickenpox scars just won't go away.

Lunch took a long time to arrive. It was ordered from some big dhaba (oxymoronic term, I know) called Apni Rasoi or something which is apparently quite popular in Dwarka. Post-lunch the number of attendees reduced drastically, so I decided to postpone the Creative Commons session to day 2. Clearly, there is some such thing as a ‘free lunch’ at least at an unconference on open source – and that was what some seemed to have come for. Although I wouldn’t blame them entirely for wanting to leave, since some of the talks in the morning had nothing to do with open source. On of the highlights of the day was a video conference with Bryan House of Acquia on the future of Drupal 7, but could not be carried through because of low bandwidth issues (we had to switch to text chat and then eventually call it off). What else would you expect on a Reliance data card? After a session on indie game development by Yadu Rajiv, we wrapped up for the day.

Day 2 started off late as it was a Sunday. (I was stopped at a Metro checkpoint for carrying a ‘walkie talkie charger’.) When I arrived at the venue at around 10.15am there were just a handful of people – almost all of them speakers who were schedule to give presentations that day. By 11am though the crowd has swelled in number to around 90 people; quite respectable for second day of an event. We had people from Adobe too to give presentations on Flex and BlazeDS – open source software released by Adobe (!!!) – and those were some of the best designed presentations by far. Students in the audience were given free (as in beer, not speech) licensed versions of Flex Builder. I think it’s a good start by companies such as Microsoft and Adobe to take some initiatives in interacting with the open source community and we shouldn’t be too cynical about it.

Lunch was better on day 2 as we had pizza from Domino’s. While placing the order we had also asked them to provide ketchup sachets. The lazy asses thought “Why bother buying so many ketchup sachets when we can ‘solve’ the problem in one go by providing a 2-litre ketchup sachet”. I didn’t even know that they made 2-litre ketchup sachets! Hilarity ensued, or rather, didn’t since we sent that back. We had a working lunch with presentations continuing while the audience wolfed down pizzas.

Mohak had to give an exam that day, so I proceeded with the talk on Creative Commons licenses on my own. The presentations I used were made by other people and released under a Creative Commons license; you can view / download Creative Commons Spectrum of Rights here (courtesy Neeru Paharia) and What is Creative Commons here (courtesy Creative Commons Australia; I used the latter to show an overview of various CC licenses). I initially planned a short session of 15-20 minutes only, but the audience was quite interested in the topic and a ‘doubt-clearing’ session on the basics of Creative Commons licensing meant that my session stretched on quite a bit longer. I was happy to note that at least some people were interested in licensing or using Creative Commons licensed works.

Speaking on Creative Commons licenses. Photo courtesy Sachin Khosla. Low quality pic because it was shot using a cellphone.

One of the most charming things about an unconference is the ‘two-feet rule’: if you don’t like a talk, use your two feet and walk out of the room any time you want. At any given time, you’ll find at least a few people hanging out at the nearest cafeteria having a chat on pretty much everything under the sun. Had a quite a bit of that at this OSSCamp too. Must say that I enjoy this informal interactions a lot! Mohak had also joined us by this time after finishing his exam and joined in on these informal chat sessions.

Bryan House’s video conference had been shifted to day 2 but eventually had to be cancelled again due to low bandwith issues. I had another session towards the end of day 2 – a quiz on open source. Mohak Prince, a community volunteer for Mozilla pitched in with Mozilla merchandise (laptop stickers, tattoos, badges); Shayon Pal from Linux For You pitched in with a few copies of LFY magazine; Sachin Khosla pledged a .in domain giveaway courtesy Digimantra. And thus, we had goodies to give away as prizes for every answer. Some got the prizes out of sheer guesswork, some got them because they knew the answer; mostly though it was because they Google-searched the answers. :p Anyway, it’s an unconference so we didn’t mind. Click here to download OSSCamp Delhi 2009 Open Source Quiz presentation that I gave at the event.

Soon, it was time to pack up. I still had one Linux For You magazine which hadn’t been given away to anyone in the quiz, so we decided to make it a ‘give-away’, literally. Here’s a video of me as Santa Claus, minus the beard and the ho-ho-ho ‘giving away’ an LFY issue.

[yahoo 15421776]

Linux For You mag give-away at OSSCamp Delhi 2009

We had a customary group photo session after that. As I browse through these pictures on my laptop (I will be uploading the full set of pictures soon; currently my Internet connection is down and I’m posting this via GPRS), I feel a bit sad about the fact that this will be last unconference that I will be attending in India for a while. Over the past one year, I’ve made such good friends and got to know some great people through the string of such events that I have attended. The amount of enthusiasm that community members at these events show is simply amazing. I shall certainly miss the buzzing energy of upcoming unconferences!

PS – Click here to read my tweets from OSSCamp 2009.

[gyaan.in] Monthly Archive – July 2009

It has been two weeks now since gyaan.in was launched. Let me take this opportunity to, once again, say a big ‘Thank You!’ to all members of the gyaan.in community and visitors of gyaan.in who have ensured that this initiative is off to a great start. We have ‘question of the day’ threads going on at gyaan.in daily, and this post is a compilation of the best questions asked in the month of July 2009. These are in no particular order.

Which is the Indian city whose Maharana was the only royalty who did not attend the Delhi Durbar for King George V in 1911, and why? (by bhavika)
Maharana Fateh Singh of Udaipur. He kept his place at the Delhi Railway Station, where the King Emperor came to meet him—as one ruler meets another with equal honour, because Udaipur is the only city which has never been captured by the Mughals. Their defence was impenetrable.
1908 Summer Olympics were actually to be held in Rome, but something happened that eventually made the venue shift to London. What was it? (by nasri)
Mount Vesuvius erupted in 1906, so Italians couldn’t afford to hold the games while reconstruction was going on.
Which dictator titled himself: “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor____________, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular”? (by Galen)
Idi Amin
What is a wrackground image? (by Kush)
Any kind of texture or background image on a web page that does not let the viewers properly read the text displayed on the page, due to bright colors of the image/texture.
Rolex has created only one digital watch till date. Where can you find it? (by crystalunicorn)
Wimbledon
There are only two batsmen in the history of English cricket who have scored centuries on their away and home TEST debuts. One of them is the current opening batsman Andrew Strauss; who’s the other? (by venky)
Ranjitsinhji. He scored 62 and 154 not out against Australia at Old Trafford in his first Test, becoming the second batsman after W. G. Grace to score a century on his debut for England and also the first batsman to score 100 before lunch (on the third day, moving from 41 not out to 154 not out in just over 2 hours). He scored 175 in the first innings of his first overseas Test, also against Australia in 1897 (at that time it was the highest score that had ever been made for England in Test cricket).
Which noted Indian personality’s father was one of the three main (Indian) contractors who built Connaught Place? The other two were Sardar Dharam Singh and Rai Bahadur Narain Singh. (by bhavika)
Khushwant Singh
Which organization was started after its founder came to know about two students who had been sent to jail for a period of seven years for raising a toast ‘to liberty’? (by ankurb)
Amnesty International
Codenamed ‘Milan’ this piece of ‘hardware’ was introduced at the D5 conference in 2007. As soon as it was launched on April 17, 2008, it found a place in the Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, Innoventions Dream Home and was used by MSNBC for the 2008 US Presidential elections. It was the brainchild of Mr. Steven B and Mr. Andy W. (by boris)
Microsoft Surface
The first thing you notice about the Red Fort is the great wall or the ‘curtain’ which stands in front of the Lahore Gate (the one on Chandni Chowk). But this wall wasn’t built by Shah Jahan; in fact, it was a later addition by Aurangzeb. Why did he build it? (by bhavika)
Court etiquette decreed that, as long as the nobles were in view of the emperor, they had to move about on foot and not on horseback or palanquins. They also had to keep bowing, à la Mughal-e-Azam. So Aurangzeb built the curtain wall, and the the courtiers simply became invisible to him. He probably did it because he found all this protocol irritating.
What is in the dark (refer to the picture)? (by achu_182)
‘Tumbler’ (better known as ‘Batmobile‘) from Chris Nolan’s Batman franchise.
Born in 1963, who holds the position of Chief Happiness Officer in the company he works for? (by achu_182)
Ronald McDonald
Which Bollywood film’s director offered a money back guarantee if the audience did not like it, but kept his promise to only 5000 viewers across India? (by crystalunicorn)
Mani Shankar for Mukhbiir
What connects the names of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? (by pearlsinghal)
They’re all named after Renaissannce age artists – Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Connect Youtube, a game called Zero Wing by Sega, and Simply Awful. (by achu_182)
Zero Wing gave us “All your base belong to us” which was popularised in the forum Simply Awful (similar to 4chan) and was used by Youtube as an April Fool’s prank)
Fool On The Hill is a song originally written by Paul McCartney and recorded by the Beatles in 1967 eventually appearing in the Magical Mystery Tour album. In April of ’75 it also entered history. Why? (by Rhead)
In April 1975, at the Homebrew Computer Club fourth meeting, Steve Dompier programmed his MITS Altair 8800 personal computer to play The Fool on the Hill. The trick was that the output device was a nearby AM radio. Dompier had programmed his computer so that the electromagnetic interference created by the primitive PC produced recognizable tones on the radio.
An estimated 100,000 copies of the Playstation version of Tiger Woods 99 were recalled when something was found as a hidden file on the disk. What was found? (by Rhead)
The Spirit of Christmas, a small video, that eventually became South Park.

School quiz archives: DPS Noida eSpice 2009, Montfort School Gateway 2009, DPS RK Puram Geography Quiz.

Now that that is done, let me give some statistics. gyaan.in is currently getting around 250 unique visitors daily; pageloads are 4-5 times that figure. This is in a sense expected for a forum, but it also indicates that a lot of people are visiting multiple pages. The odd thing is that we have around 90 registered members till now – so that means a lot of visitors are just browsing content without signing up. I call this odd because signing up for gyaan.in is an extremely simple procedure:

Fill up the shortest sign up form in the history of sign-up forms. You only need to fill in your login/user ID, email address (will be used to notify you of new wall posts on your profile; we promise we won’t spam!) and what you want to keep as your password. If you want, you may also fill in your real name.
All sign-up requests go into a review queue. One of the gyaan.in moderators will have a look to weed out ‘obvious’ spambot accounts. Your request will be approved within 24 hours, but generally it should be within a few hours.
That’s it! Post anything you want. There’s a quickstart guide for gyaan.in and guidelines for posting question of the day which you might want to read up to get your bearings.

I understand that some of you might just want to read the content. That’s OK! 🙂 But the reason why I’m suggesting signing-up is because that will make your browsing exprience on gyaan.in a lot easier. Our forum keeps track of the last comment you read in any thread since your last login, and when you come back to visit again it neatly shows you which discussions have unread comments (and how many of them). It will also automatically take you to the point in a discussion from which newer comments begin. So even if you’re just going to read content, signing-up will make navigation easier.

A few more stats. Around 57% visitors are returning visitors. A whopping 81.4% of visitors spend a significant amount of time on the site (‘significant’ is defined as visit length from anywhere more than 10 minutes to greater than one hour); 20% spend 30 minutes to more than one hour on the site. Browser wars: 62.4% of visitors use Firefox, 21.4% use Google Chrome, and the rest use Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari / iPhone Safari. And we’re definitely .in – 98.4% of visitors are from India; 75% of those visitors are from Delhi / NCR.

Do check out gyaan.in if you haven’t already!