The Codefest

The AsiaOSS codefest was hosted by Virtusa at its Trans Asia advanced technology center. Most participants were from Japan and Sri Lanka. We had Niibe, Kazuki Ohta, Masayuki Hatta from Japan (among others), and Bud, Anuradha Weeraman, Pradeeper and members of the Sahana team from Sri Lanka. I started working on Kudzu optimizations (which is yet to be blogged somewhere else), while Anuradha W started writing the installer for Taprobane using gtk2-perl. I did a short presentation about Taprobane. We also tried timing Taprobane bootup with Knoppix. Taprobane took nearly 2 minutes, while Knoppix took 3. But the win is not exactly 1 minute, because we didn't have pcmcia and scim starting. Me and Anuradha W finished the coding at around 5 a.m. and went home. The next day (7th), we were a bit late, and it delayed the starting of the `key signing party'. It was a nice experience. Martin Michlmayr also joined the party. The official innaguaration of the week was at Trans Asia, but didn't have time to join. Another very important outcome of the codefest is the SCIM Sinhala input module by Kazuki. He converted my GTK im module to SCIM and Niibe uploaded it to Debian. Me and Bud left the codefest in the afternoot for few hours to attend Martin's FOSSSL tutorial on `Contributing to Debian'. Rasmus Lerdorf did a parallel tutorial on PHP (obviously). In the evening, most of us joined the AsiaOSS dinner at Ceylon Continental. We met Bruce Momjian, Greg Stein, Sam Ruby, Rasmus Lerdorf and Danese Cooper outside the hotel. I also had a brief chat with Manju, CEO of ICTA, who had used Taprobane for his presentation despite it's still tagged `beta'. Overall, the codefest was very successful. We did get a lot of interruptions on organizing stuff, but neverthless managed to some good coding. We are looking forward to the next one and also to host a few local codefests. Devaka Randeniya and Tyrell Perera of Virtusa R&D did most of organizing behind the scene. Suntel provided Wifi and wired Internet connectivity, and Virtusa MIS helped with other IT logistics.