niyam bhushan's photostream  

Jai Pandya holds up his laptop bag, proudly displaying his Gnome and especially Firefox buttons, with Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera software and tech-genius behind the Opera web-browser, stands in the background. Cheeky, eh!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Stephenson_von_Tetzchner

Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner answering questions at the Opera Meetup at Ruby Tuesday in Delhi. Had a great discussion with him on FOSS, open standards, eBooks, Linux-Delhi, and more. I don't have to agree with his views on keeping Opera proprietary, to admire this man. Nice guy. Hope to meet him again.

The World's Most Expensive MP3-Player :-)
My iPod finally died last night, but I had to listen to this large MP3 file on my drive the next morning. So i booted my Apple MacBookPro laptop into my favourite Ubuntu, played the file, and plugged the laptop into the car stereo. I then shoved the laptop into the back-pocket of the front-seat. Whew! In case you're wondering, I use the ample time and opportunity available in Delhi's crawling and congested traffic, to catch up on listening to Osho's fabulous discourses.

The World's Most Expensive MP3-Player :-)
My iPod finally died last night, but I had to listen to this large MP3 file on my drive the next morning. So i booted my Apple MacBookPro laptop into my favourite Ubuntu, played the file, and plugged the laptop into the car stereo. I then shoved the laptop into the back-pocket of the front-seat. Whew! In case you're wondering, I use the ample time and opportunity available in Delhi's crawling and congested traffic, to catch up on listening to Osho's fabulous discourses.

The grand entrance to Sagar Hotel in Bikaner. Love the play of light on its ornate walls. The hotel is situated in a quiet, peaceful neighbourhood of Bikaner. A stroll down the road from the hotel takes you to the even grander Lalbaugh Palace. Must visit that the next time am here.
Invited to deliver talks at Rajasthan’s largest and most prestigious engineering college which is spread across 337 acres: the Engineering College of Bikaner (ECB) www.ecb.ac.in/.
ECB has around 6,000 students enrolled on its campus, out of which around 2,500 alone are in IT and Computer Science courses.
Delivered two talks on Linux and Free & Open Source Software (FOSS): ‘How to Avoid the Axe Effect’; and ‘How to Make a Dent in the Universe’. The talks were delivered at the ‘FOSS GN09 event’ which was cleverly dove-tailed with the college’s yearly techfest mega-event, called ‘Sakshama’. An ancient Sanskrit word, ‘Sakshama’ means ‘skilled; competent; adept’. The 2009 incarnation of the event, held from 28th to 31st October, was called ‘Sakshama GN09’, to highlight ‘Generation Next’. www.sakshama.org.

And what a Generation Next! They also sought my help and mentoring in launching their own on-campus Linux Users Group (LUG), www.lugb.in. Am quite impressed with their active mailing-lists and outreach activities. These guys and gals are rocking! Together with its founders, we launched LUG-Bikaner at the ‘Sakshama GN09’ event-night, on an outdoor stage in front of an audience of over 2,500.
ECB has around 1,200 computers on-campus, and with the personal laptops and desktops of students, totals at around 4,000 PCs. Till date, LUG-Bikaner has migrated over 500 computers to Linux, and still counting. Plus, they also reach out to other colleges and institutions within Rajasthan to spread the awareness of this ‘muft and mukt’ vision of computing. After all, who can understand freedom better than the royal state of Rajasthan in India?