Hell Oh Entropy!

Firstly,

and I’ve got a lot of things to do once I’m there!

FUDCon Pune 2011 has a wonderful line-up of talks and sessions going for it this weekend. I have added three workshops of my own too:

• Getting started with autotools: This is intended to be a hands-on session on autotools. I have done this session multiple times before and it has been quite successful with beginners looking to understand the GNU build system.
• Security exploits, Live!: This was originally Amit Shah’s idea, since he wanted someone to do a demo of buffer overflows and similar stuff. You don’t really have to be an aspiring security professional to attend this, since most of the ideas are based on basic programming fundamentals
• Apache Qpid messaging: “Enterprise Applications” are not typically things that you deal with when you’re in college. Quite often one ends up thinking of these things as inaccessible due to high costs and high perceived difficulty level. In this session, I intend to demonstrate how easy it is to write really complicated applications with mind-blowing ease.

I finally got involved in preparations for FUDCon this week to try and help wherever needed. Rahul suggested I help out with the schedule arrangement, since I had some ideas on the layout of some sessions. We slugged it out for about 4 hours yesterday and another 3 hours today at the Red Hat office, trying to make sure we schedule talks in a manner that attendees can follow tracks (virtualization, security, web apps, embedded, etc.) and at the same time, have enough flexibility to add talks and sessions without having to shuffle things around all the time. Saleem has become a pro at copy-pasting across cells in spreadsheets as a result.

The end result is pretty impressive and we’re expecting even more submissions to keep people busy. There were concerns on whether there were too many sessions running in parallel, but I don’t think that matters. The event attendance is expected to be quite large, so there will e enough audience to keep all speakers busy. Besides, I don’t know a single conference where one gets to attend each and every talk in the conference. The real fun of the conference is to meet friends, collaborators and fellow geeks and not just sitting in rooms and listening to people talk.

Oh, and we have hackfests throughout the day on Sunday. The one I am particularly psyched about is Kushal Das’ libgqpid. It was an idea we had brainstormed about earlier and he wrote a lot of the code in it. Hopefully we can get a release out on Sunday with the core qpid client features ready. For the uninitiated (which is pretty much everyone I guess, since Kushal has not published the code yet), libgqpid is a glib based C wrapper around the qpid C++ client.

Looking forward to having a great time at FUDCon!