Been feeling a frog in my throat for the past couple of days. Woke up last night with raging fever and a violent throat-ache. Actually, a violent everything-ache, but the throat is prominent.
I knew what was coming next, and sure enough woke up this morning with a laryngitis. Couldn’t get a single sound out.
Of course, we all know that it never rains but pours, so add to that the fact that our colony’s electricity transformer blew spectacularly last night, resulting in a night without power – it finally came back this morning at 11am.
So I couldn’t talk, chat, mail, read, browse, sit, sleep or eat.
This promises to be one of those days that my mommy warned me about when I was younger.
On the positive side – with less than 36 hours left for closing of speaker registrations and talk proposal submissions for FOSS.IN/2005, we have (at the time of writing this) 110 speakers registered, along with 139 talk submissions. And registrations are still pouring in.
What really thrills me is that I am finally seeing what I have been longing to see – talk proposals from the FOSS community, on FOSS subjects (both technical and non-technical). And almost all of them from India.
Since FOSS.IN is about FOSS in India and the Indian FOSS community (as the name of the event implies), this last bit is of primary importance to me personally. This is what I have worked for all these years – getting Indians involved in FOSS not just as users, but as developers and contributors. This is the primary objective of FOSS.IN.
A number of people had expressed worry about their intended talks being insignificant in the face of the many FOSS gurus who will also participate in the event. Here’s something that I had posted to the mailing lists a while back:
A word about the “Guru Shishya Syndrome” that seems to be keeping many people from submitting talks:
The GSS is a situation when someone doesnt want to participate as a speaker when a well known personality is also speaking on that subject. For example, someone who wanted to give a talk on foo doesnt register his talk because the primary developer of foo will also be speaking at the event.
This is ridiculous. Even if Linus Torvalds were to come and speak at the event, do you really think that he would cover *every* aspect of the kernel in his talks? He couldn’t do that even if he tried – it would take many people to cover the various aspects of kernel development.
And every little bit counts. Even a 20 minute talk about how to optimise a Postgresql database, or how to efficiently patition a linux or freebsd installation disk, or how to slim down your kernel. Remember, for every person who knows a little bit about something, there are thousands who do not, and would be grateful for that little tidbit of knowledge that you thought to be insignificant.
Speaker/talk registrations close Saturday night, the 8th of October. If you want to be part of this huge Indian “FOSS coming of age” party, you still have time to chip in with your talks, workshops, tutorials and BoFs.