The OpenAlchemy Project is the opensourced version of Alchemy – the user interface used on the Amida Simputer.

Everytime I have shown the Simputer to people abroad, the first thing people have commented on was the interface, and have asked if it was possible to make the code available.

Now Alchemy has been opensourced, and the code is out there, under the GPL. Several people have started actively working on it, including some well known names outside India. There is a lot of work to be done, and if you ever wanted to get involved with a FOSS project, this would be a good way to start. And since the port going on is to the OpenEmbedded platform, you would actually be involved with both projects.

If you are interested in contributing to the project (especially if you are a student), go over to http://openalchemy.org, join the mailing list (you will find some familiar people there already), read through the archives, find out what needs doing – and go for it!

Earlier today, DHL delivered me an OpenMoko phone.

Apparently, I am one of the 50 people picked to receive this “Phase 0″ piece. The way that post is phrased, it kind of feels like receiving a lifetime achievement award! I am certainly in quite august company!

This is truly hackable phone – it goes to the extent of including a torque screwdriver so that you can open the phone!

And this has by far the most glorious small screen I have ever seen (640×480). Plus built-in GPS. More hardware info here

The number of things included! Apart from the phone and the torgue screwdriver, there is an interface board to aid development, a USB charger, a stylus/pen/flashlight/laserpointer, in-ear earphones, a pouch, microsd card+SD adaptor…..

Then the cherry on the pie – a guitar plectrum.

A guitar plectrum???

Apparently, it is for prying the case open, so you don’t break your fingernails! I took it for test drive immediately while the phone was charging – feels real good playing Rock and Roll with it on my black Ibanez AR-50. If anyone from OpenMoko is reading this – the plectrum passes QC quite nicely!

I am going to have fun with this phone, and expect that I will be writing about it soon. But right now, I need to quickly catch up with a lot of stuff that happened in the past two weeks.

Update: Lots of people bugged me for photos. I really don’t have the patience or the skill for that, so how about looking at Koen “OPenEmbeded” Kooi’s photoset instead?

This Friday, I return to NIT Calicut, where I spoke two years ago.

NITC’s FOSS event has grown in stature, and is quickly becoming one of the recognized FOSS events in India, along with Gnunify, Freedel and of course FOSS.IN.

This also marks the return to my “college speaking circuit”. Over the next six to eight months, I will be speaking at a lot of colleges, to get more people to participate in FOSS projects.

I will be in Calicut Friday afternoon through Sunday morning (I wish I could have stayed till the end of Sunday, but unfortunately I have to be back in Bangalore for a very important meeting on Sunday afternoon). I will be giving two talks – on Friday, I have been honoured with the keynote address slot, where I will be speaking about “FOSS in your Professional Life”, and on Saturday night, I will be covering the topic of “FOSS Business Models”.

But I don’t just do these trips to spread the word about FOSS, but also watch other speakers in action. Many of them will also submit talk proposals for FOSS.IN, and having seen them in action makes the selection process so much easier.

One additional item returns to my agenda – I will be looking for smart, capable people who could potentially join my teams at Geodesic, to help us develop some of the exciting software and hardware projects we are working on. I have actually always done this – I have found some of the best people I have ever worked with (and who have become some of my closest friends) at events like these. That’s probably because all smart, tech-savvy people are into FOSS.

And almost all of these people were in college when I first spotted them – some in their first year of engineering.

So if any of you are excited about mobile computing (on diverse platforms, including Linux, Symbian, J2ME, PalmOS – even Windows Mobile!) , have always dreamt of working on exciting projects, such as the Simputer, are raring to develop solutions for the next billion people who won’t be using desktop computers, and if you are into FOSS, then I want to talk to you.

Today is my birthday.

Strange as it may appear, I don’t really feel any different. I think I stopped really feeling any different after I turned 30.

Last night, I crashed early, hoping to get some sleep. I have been sleeping badly these past few days, and I don’t really wake up feeling like I had a whole lot of rest. Usually, that is in fact true – at least three StarTrek episodes every night (I finally finished all seven seasons of ST:TNG last week, and ST:DS9 and ST:TOS last year, and I am into ST:VOY now), and that usually keeps me up till around 2am.

Wife and daughter had other plans. At midnight, I got hauled out of bed to cut a home made cake. Mumbling to myself, I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, and trudged downstairs. Strangely, the dogs were nowhere to be found.

I settled at the dining table , and blearily reached for the knife, when a most horrible sound shattered the silence of the night. It sounded like someone was strangling his mother-in-law, or maybe got his tie caught in a lawnmover. Focusing a bit, I realised that it sounded familiar.

It was.

It was a bunch of drunken football hooligans in my bathroom – singing “Happy Birthday to you”.

OK – “singing” was stretching things a bit, given that this crowd included well known anti-tenors such as Shreyas and Kalyan and Shanu (be afraid, glasspanes, be very afraid!). There were lots of squeals as well, which I recognised to be the Sequeira twins. And rising above that the well-seasoned roar of Gaurav and the unmistakable angel voice that could only be Noella.

They all trudged out, carrying one more cake. And the phone started ringing off the hook as well. At one point, I was sitting there, a knife in each hand (one for each cake), with phone clamped between my ear and shoulder, talking to a beautiful lady in Delhi, while gathering breath to blow out the solitary candle on each cake.

Cake dispersed (including generously on my face), everyone trudged off to test-drive our new futons. No piece of furniture in my house is found acceptable unless it has felt the brunt of this bunch of people cramming onto it.

Then Anjali handed me the family birthday gift – which happened to be Norah Jones’ new album, which I have been desperately trying to lay my hands on for several weeks now, and which was not available in any online shop in India. I was all set to order it from Amazon – luckily, I don’t have to now.

Mysterious bottles of wine appeared from nowhere, and even some flat Coke, and more phone calls.

Finally everyone went home, and I fell back into bed.

Today, we (Shubha, Anjali and I) went and had lunch at Memories of China, but otherwise it was a normal working day for me. Well, almost normal – the phone calls never stopped.

My brother made my day with his gift – a week-long holiday in a place of my choosing. God knows I need it, and I am going to take it – Real Soon Now.

Damn, I have a lot of friends and family.

No party today, being a working day. Maybe this weekend – given that Friday the 23rd is our 20th wedding anniversary….

The folks who brought you the most successful Barcamp in India (Barcamp Chennai), India’s first blogging event (BlogCamp) and India’s first “startup enabler event” (proto.in), now comes

And they don’t take prisoners – Jimbo “Wikipedia” Wales himself is coming for the event.

If you are into Wikis and collaborative software, you have to be braindead to miss this event, so be in Chennai on February 25th.

See you there.

The Bangalore Linux Users Group meets at 6pm today.

Details here.

Be there.

I missed documenting this on the day it happened (on the 13th of January), but it marked the 5th anniversary of my seeing Phenom perform for the first time, and it was the beginning of a great friendship that has now lasted more than half a decade.

The first time I saw them perform, they were raw and loud, but over the years, they matured into something really solid. I spent many enjoyable hours listening to them practice, compose and perform songs over the years. And, as they are aware, they managed to fill what I called “a hole in my soul”.

I was there to see Phenom record their first album (which they released under a Creative Commons license – a first for any Indian rock group), when they reformed with Mark and Tiny after Sashi had to leave, and I was there when they played their farewell gig in 2006.

On January 26th this year, I was in Mumbai to be present at the launch of Creative Commons in India. As a part of this event, a CD containing a lot of Creative Commons licensed material from India was released, and to my surprise and delight, I found that as a representative of CC licensed music from India, Phenom’s album had been included! What a fitting tribute to this little band! Many thanks, Creative Commons India, for this gesture!

While Phenom the group disbanded last year after Mrinal and JD left for the USA, there is always the hope that Gaurav, Mark and their friends, who are still in India, will get together and maybe bring out a new incarnation of Phenom, with new faces and fresh music.

After all, the show must go on!

I would like President Kalam continue as President of India for a second term.

Never in our recent history have we had a president who has been so close to the people, who understands the challenges of the times, and who has not been afraid to voice his opinions about tthings.

People trust him, and believe in what he says. He inspires the citizens of India, and the rest of the world. I can think of no one more qualified to represent India as head of state, and even though the role of President of India is often seen as a ceremonial one, rather than a functional one, President Kalam has actually managed to change that image, and given the post more meat – and more teeth.

I know that many people don’t believe such things work, but for me, signing this petition is putting my name to a thought I would love to see come true.

If you think the way I do, then consider letting the world know, by adding your name to this petition.

At Geodesic, we build applications and devices for the next billion users.

The company has been declared a winner of the prestigious Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India 06 programme, which recognizes excellence, innovation and the fastest growing technology companies.

We are into communication and collaboration software, such as Mundu IM, Mundu Radio, Mundu Speak and a number of as yet unreleased products in the mobile and wireless communication space. And of course, we are the people taking the Simputer forward into new and exciting areas.

To help us do this, we need experienced developers who can help us build these products.

Specifically, we are looking people in these areas:

- PalmOS developers
- Symbian developers
- WindowsMobile developers
- J2ME developers
- Linux system developers (embedded and device)

You will be working with my teams and me to conceive, design and develop these products.

If you have two years or more of experience in any of these fields, and would like to work in Bangalore or Mumbai, we’d love to hear from you.

If you have been active in any Free and Open Source project, please do send us URLs that show us your work. That will *definitely* put you on the fast track. And it does not matter if the FOSS project is related to what we do or not.

To apply, you can type/paste your resume into my Contact Form (make sure that you select “Job Application” as a subject), or write to careers (at) geodesic dot com, “Attention: Atul Chitnis”. Try to mention as many details as possible.

We understand that you may feel compelled to use Microsoft Word documents for your resume, but we would really appreciate it if you could send us a PDF or RTF or HTML or plain ASCII document instead.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Yesterday, the Bangalore Linux Users Group had its monthly meet, and it rocked!

The meet was, as usual, at HP’s Shezan Lavelle facility, with its modern conference room with all facilities (except coffee – more about that later About 35 people attended, and a lot of new faces were to be seen as well.

Waiting for people to assemble, we started the meet talking about various things, but the discussion quickly converged on cell phones (my new Treo 680 triggered that). Amazingly, several people in the room sported PalmOS powered phones, and the merits and demerits of each model were highlighted.

Once everyone had assembled (with Mahendra and Philip missing – boo!), coordinator Tejas called the meeting to order, and after a very efficient “rapid fire” round of introductions (imagine 30+ people introducing themselves in about 2 minutes), we started the main agenda.

Our speaker for the day was Open Source Initiative Board Member Russ Nelson (who had also spoken at FOSS.IN/2006). Russ spoke about The Politics and Technology of the DNS system.

It is always a pleasure to listen to someone speak about something he has personally experienced and has first hand knowledge of, and this was no exception: Russ had tons of tales from the trenches, and a lot of insights to offer. Even those of us who have had many years of experience with this stuff learned a lot of new stuff. The Q&A round brought up many fascinating aspects as well, including issues with internationalised domain names, alternate DNS systems, cache poisoning, etc.

A thoroughly enjoyable technical session, and a fantastic way to start the year for the BLUG.

But more was to come.

Russ then proceeded to tell us about this amazing role playing game that has been “infecting” all the Open Source conferences that he has been attending. The game is called “Werewolf” (also known as “Mafia“), and involves the entire audience present. I won’t go into too much detail on how it is played (you can read the links above), but let me tell you this – from being a skeptic about whether such games would work, I went to being a rabid fan. And I am clearly not the only one.

We played two rounds of Werewolf, with Russ being the moderator, and we had a “howling” good time. Ingo Wichmann (one of the LinuxTag guys – the equivalent of FOSS.IN in Europe), who also attended, *really* managed to liven the game up with his comments and constantly misleading everyone.

The meet finally broke up at 9pm (a kind of a record), and we moved to the nearby Shezan Restaurant for dinner. Excellent food, excellent conversation, tons of FOSS discussions.

[Update] I forgot to write about the coffee (and half a dozen people have written to me about it!) So the story goes that *usually* we have coffee waiting for us in the conference room, courtesy HP. But this time, being a holiday, no such joy. After much ribbing and cajoling, Tejas went to the nearby CoffeeDay and got everyone coffee, which led to some energetic werewolfing.

Many thanks, Tejas!
[/Update]

What a day!

Speaking of the Open Source Initiative board members – this is definitely an OSI month for me. Starting with Russ yesterday, I hope to met up with Rishab Aiyer Ghosh later this week, and on the 26th I meet up with Joichi Ito at the Creative Commons India launch on the 26th. Never mind the frequent interactions with Danese Cooper, who has become a really close friend and has been doing all she can for FOSS in India.

The Creative Commons is particularly important to me – it is to my cultural side what Free and Open Source Software is to my technology side. Phenom in 2004 became the first rock group in India to release their work under an unmodified CC license- partly due to my interaction with Lawrence Lessig in 2004 in Berlin. CC-licensed works have been springing up across the world, and they are doing for culture what the GPL and other open licenses have been doing for software. Even one of the projects I play a small role in – RadioVeRVe – strongly encourages people to release at least part of their work under a CC license.

BTW – the Creative Commons India launch event has my employer, Geodesic Information Systems Ltd., as one of its sponsors. It gives me a warm feeling in the tummy to have Geodesic support so many initiatives, including FOSS.IN, BarCamps, Creative Commons, and many others.