Juwal Bose Says

Final Venue (fixed)
DOE (Department of Electronics) Seminar Hall CUSAT
Thrikkakara Campus

Sessions

Xtend IVR – A RAD Toolkit for Telephony

by Jayakrishnan K

This was a demo for an IVR toolkit called Xtend IVR.
This is a fairly comprehensive IVR toolkit – it supports Indian
languages and had its own simple scripting language.

Mobile Social Networking in 25 days

By Vishnu Gopal

He spearheaded the change for Mobshare.in to make it ’sellable’

java-script: The most underestimated, undervalued and misunderstood language

By Binny VA

He explained how JS is such a powerful language which is never fully exploited and the power never really churned out..

Develop a webservice in 5 minutes using nuSoap library

By Sanil

How to use the nuSoap PHP library to connect to and create Web Services.

Game Development Using Flash

By Me and Anish

Well this one was fun. Last time we had pormised to take a session, but couldnt do it. This time we had planned to do it for sure. The idea was to take a multi session where eldhose will take DirectX stuff, i will do some Flash stuff and Anish will demonstrate with the development of Balancing Mathai. Alas! Eldhose got severe cold and it was onto me and Anish to deliver and we had one day to do that. I started thinking and thought Anish will probably take a session on making without slides and i even doubted if he will show up as he had to travel a lot to reach the place. I planned to take a new session which can be lengthened if need be and shortened without trouble. Then came up the idea of Mobile game dev!

In normal business at csharks we would never have thought about this unless we had a plan to start it in the monthly meeting. I started r and d on saturday and read some good articles by Indian Flash lite Guru Marian D of india games. It was real encouraging as well as challenging. Then eldhose came up with a flashlite demo game which i tried to study. Then the idea was born, let us port our own Balancing Mathai game to mobile in FlashLite 1.1 I had the art and the technology, i just need to face the practical problems. Back home i started the work at 8pm. It took me to 2am sunday to complete the working demo.

I didnt have the slides though, hence i put up alarm at 5 am. Mom was coming back from Kasagoad that morning and hence i had to wake up early anyways. Early morning i seriously started working on Openoffice. I never had tried to create slides with it till that day. Anyways things well really fast and i had the slides by 8 am. Eldhose came by with severe cold to give the laptop amd checked out the slides and the prototype. I didnt look twice and copied everything onto the laptop and started to Cusat. I was late and the first session had already started. We had Sha at Cusat who was once the managing partner of Csharks currently doing his MBA at cusat. Anish was not to be seen. I Doubted if i have to take the session all by myself. After some time Anish called in and he reached us. Along with sha we moved to front row for Vyshnus Mobshare session.

All sessions planned were not there, but the leaders of the theme was Kenney and Vyshnu from the last Barcamp. I was looking forward to meet some one from Depicti media, but they we stuck up in blore and could not attend. We had out lunch at the ICH cusat with treat from Sha who was telling us that we were visistors to his premises. ..very nice indeed! Last session was ours after Binnys JS enlightner and nuSoap by Sanil. Anish started off an unprepared realtime presentation with some hype and excellent choice of steps. His presentation was precise and he amazed the crowd by showing just hoe simple it was to turn some code into a great game. When balancing mathai was demonstrated people were really impressed. Sha was always there to start the cheer and some times it turned out to be awkward. After Anish i had my session which interested 50% of the audience while other were sleeping . Anyways there was a lot of questions after finishing the session and i liked when people wanted to know more about game dev, blender and stuff.

After session there was a talk by Armia CEO and he promised to sponsor the next barcamp at Infoark and to get atleast 5 ceos to sit and hear the things. Kenney also told about how students were going to start barcamp Junior. We are looking forward to the next barcamp which may be at infopark or NIT calicut. What will be the next session? Will decide the day before

I was there for barcampkerala3 at cusat campus.

This time around I took a session on Blender software tool. Can ceck the videos of that session here.
I cannot be rash and comment that things doesnot look good or promising, but lets say its like with a startup. It takes a great lot of time and effort for things to really get going. Now we all were of the opinion that barcamp culture in kerala has really come to age. The attendance and quality of craowd really betrayed everything. But then its great to be part of the core team with the vision and the will to persist.

So the different sessions taken were Development in Visual Web Developer by Shalvin P, Programming paradigms by Praseed, Fire bug by Binny, Scrumming with CollabTeam by Abrachan, Blending with Blender by Juwal Bose (me) and Mobile experience with m.mobshare by Vyshnu.

Microsoft had sponsored the T shirts and we spent rs 30 on each as it took some expense to get those across the border. The attendance was not as good as expected and hence the food arranged seemed to be too much. The organisers did a good work making it all taken care off.

There was a filler session taken regarding startups and ideas which seemed to help a lot of people wth some vision to go ahead and make a mark. Two people who really stood out were Praseed Pai and arun basil lal. Praseed with his paradigms class really made everyone think if they are a real programer r not. He had this vast knowledge that he even asked me lots of questions on Blender which was pretty much a boring topic for a techie. Arun on the other hand was the most active attendee with a lot of questions for everyone and with a lot of thought provoking remarks.

As for me I think we really need to rethink the total strategy here. Running around for sponsors, getting the event organised, getting quality crowd present sessions, getting space to arranging the event and when the turnaround is not so heartwarming, we should think another way. Lets make next barcamp an online meetup. We dont need much sponsors, not much running around for space or getting quality crowd travel to places. I dont know much about the technical difficulty if we video cast something which is being viewed by more than say 100 ppl around the state. But then once such a culture kicks off i believe it will be much better to organise and get things going.