January-2007
From Blug.in
On January 15th 2007, the Bangalore Linux Users Group had its monthly meet, and it rocked!
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[edit] Location
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.
[edit] Waiting
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.
[edit] Introductions
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.
[edit] Russ Nelson
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. :)
[edit] Werewolf
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. :)
[edit] Dinner
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!
What a day! :)
Written by Atul Chitnis
