KDE @ FOSS.IN/2008 – I’m Missing it. :-(

Last year, I was at FOSS.IN and this played a major factor in increasing my enthusiasm for FOSS contribution. I saw and met a whole bunch of FOSS Developers, primarily KDE and Debian contributors, particularly Till Adam (KDE), Kartik Mistry (KDE.IN, Debian) and Christian Perrier (Debian) and that really drove me to contribute. The same night, I went back and built KDE 4.x on my desktop, which I had ‘given up’ after some stage earlier. Thereafter, I produced patches more frequently than earlier.

This year, I really wanted to go to FOSS.IN – It’d have been a ‘debut’ as a “developer” – but the schedule of end-semester examinations at my college matches perfectly with that of FOSS.IN, preventing every FOSS enthusiast / developer here from attending the event.

That the KDE.IN team has done a lot more this year than the last is very obvious. This time we had a significant number of people helping with the planning. I have been out of the loop this semester, unfortunately, due to academic work (or so I claim. Anyway, it was a general observation amongst my friends that I was more ’serious’ when it comes to academics this semester), and didn’t help much with the planning. But the signs are very clear that it is going to be bigger and better than last time.

Recently, there were these ‘Pillars of KDE’ posters that the KDE.IN team made for FOSS.IN and they’re put up here in Pradeepto’s blog. Like the transition from KDE 3.x to KDE 4.x, at first sight, the posters seem to have gathered a significant amount of ‘visual appeal’ from FOSS.IN/2007 to FOSS.IN/2008. Kudos to Kamaleshwar Morjal for such brilliant posters!

Waiting for FOSS.IN to start. There’ll be a lot of live blogging, as usual, I presume.

Hello (KDE) World

This is (hopefully) my first post on Planet KDE! I didn’t know that we could have ourselves aggregated on Planet KDE with an svn commit until I “accidentally” stumbled upon the “Add your blog” link while adding Planet KDE to the RSSNOW plasmoid. I wish to introduce myself to Planet KDE through this post.

Yes, I hadn’t been in touch with the KDE world for long and only lurked in #kdeedu or posted on kstars-devel@kde.org, until I made it to the last 2 days of aKademy 2008 (thank you Bart, Kenny, Wendy, Pradeepto!), which I thoroughly enjoyed!

So who am I? Not getting philosophical, I’m called Akarsh Simha in the real world, kstar on IRC, and asimha on the SVN, and am a student pursuing the BTech programme in Engineering Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (“IITM”), India. I have currently finished two out of four years of my course and am running on the third. I plan to pursue a career in Theoretical Physics. Programming / Software Development is one of my “primary” hobbies, the other being Amateur Astronomy.

I develop for KStars and was a Google Summer of Code (2008) student under KDE, mentored by Jason Harris. I’m a not-so-active member of the KDE India community.