2005-10-02

Mini Code Fest

Following the Asia OSSS Code Fest, we had a miniature version of it on Saturday, partly for everyone to get the hang of it, and partly to close out urgent pending items on Taprobane. UCSC kindly provided logistics, in addition to a lot of encouragement. There was a quite a number of known faces including Anuradha Weeraman, Bud (his blog entry on the event is here), Chamindra, Chamath, Deep, Kosala, Mahangu and Tharindu of UCSC. Many others joined from the UCSC (don't rememebr all the names, may be next time), including Gowri who maintains the network. We managed to get the infrastructure setup within a couple of hours, including an apt-proxy. Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a neat way to go out of the network and connect to IRC or SSH, and this forced us to use a local ircd instead. Anuradha Weeraman was working on the installer, Mahangu on the Taprobane documentation project, and Bud and myself worked on closing bug reports for a quick 0.4.2 and close out this branch. Lot of interesting work was going on all over including installing, testing, remastering and so on. There was a wired set of IBM machines with some strange CDROM drives, and booting Taprobane on them was impossible. However, Tarindu managed to install Taprobane on one of them over the network by manually copying files and running grub. Dr Ruwan, director of UCSC, visited us in the afternoon. Being a hacker himself, he has been a big supporter of FOSS activities in Sri Lanka. We are planning on the next codefest on the 15th. If anyone is interested, contact me or ask on the Taprobane list.

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