Open Source++ – Open Source Extended

Mr. Bharath – www.e141a.org

The Problem in Analysis: Buying a college / school application form.  There are huge queues, physical discomfort and mental agony involved in this process is too much to bear.  A student also has to spend a lot of time and money in getting the form, filling it up without mistakes and so on…

Solution: The community gets together to develop an application / system where the students enter their profile and then submit it to any institution…  The best part is that for every application submitted, the institution donates some money to an NGO. 

Advertising launch in chennai next week, get students to come forward and provide solutions… and then the best team gets a prize.  The software will be developed using open source technologies to build them on things like sourceforge.net.

Challenges: Application form submission, Acceptance, Connectivity, Auto – Submission, Collection of Application Fee.

GameDev

Mr. Rakesh Raju from CodeWalla… The talk was primarily on why casual games and why it would definitely benefit more to make a casual game than a serious game like a fps or an rpg…

Concoles are opening up, Web 2.0 is happening as a social computing aspect (Second Life)…

Why gamedev in India, why not???,

Casual games or serious ones – Decision

Gaming is not actually engineering… We’re in the engineering space… There is a culture behind developing a game…  There have to be people who can do a lot of board design, balace entertainment with the challenges from technology.  We have a lot of technically capable crowd… But even with the knowledge of a complex topic such as computer graphics, there are not many people that actually spend time with graphic libraries, game graphic renderers and things like that….

Because of the complexity and challenges involved in the development of games and the risk of competition involved, the best option to choose in game development is to make a casual game… And it would cost around 25k $ in developing the game in India.

A game which is as simple of tetris sells more copies than any popular fps game… The reason??? Simple gameplay, no learning curve, etc.

The technical approach behind the development of these simple and casual games is to not reinvent of the wheel…. In terms of using a game engine…

As far as art / design approaches are concerned, we need to decide between the 2d / 3d perspective… Look at the detail involved.  ALWAYS HAVE GOOD MUSIC!!!

Saw a demo of a simple game called Diamond Mine.  And another game which was created exactly on the lines of Diamond mine using a game engine called “Torque”.

The issues on using a thirdparty game engine is that the documentation is very crappy.  THe learning curve is usually steep and the talent pool that can use a game engine is pretty rare coz every game engine usually has a language of it’s own and everything is from the ground up…

Game on…

Posting post GRUB!!! :D

Lunch was kewl….  Met a ton of ppl and spoke about what they do with technology for the pure love of it… My oh my!!! Web 2.0 is “the” phenomenon….  90% of the people @ BarcampBangalore 2.0 have something or the other to do with the phenomenon… And that’s wat it is… finally… It’s about a community initiative, one of the most basic stand points on a system with a web 2.0 based initiative…  Barcamp Rocks… I’ve also signed up with Geek Nights… Another thing to do on the lines of Barcamps….

And yeah… the next set of sessions in the afternoon, Hackdays, Pyrex, Agile Project Management…. and a bagful of other beautiful topics to talk of!!!! and unconference about…

P2p Information Services – Kallol Borah

This guy runs a small business networks company called Aumega Networks in London…  Guys passionate about new technology and building systems out of the latest stuff…  Projects with Toshiba and Honeywell occurred where they had to develop enterprise level prp information services….  The presentaion is about p2p web services….

Agenda:

1. What is p2p? WHat qualifies as a web services
2. se cases
3. Requirements for programming p2p services
4. programming concepts
5. snapshots
6. how can you contribute…

Analysis of the architecture of different p2p networks on the classification of topologies….  It depends on how fast you want to find a peer on a network…

• Zoho, Flickr, Pandora, Youtube are publish and subscribe web services… where it’s all centralised… where it’s not all that good bearing the complications and the trouble you gotta take….

What problems do p2p + webservices solve?

• It’s fast….  Happens coz there is the p2p connectivity….
• Extend webservices beyond the web… Every peer becomes a publisher of it’s content…. and also the subscriber to other peers that have content wanted by the peer…
• Access services while you work online… Auto-update for eg.

Technology issues with p2p services

• Service discovery and subscription
• coping with multiple networks – must be able to find out peers over an overlay network
• Message routing – find the shortest rout to a peer
• NAT and Firewall traversals – get through firewalls, hole punching of NATS using TCP and UDP.
• Transactions – how to know the remote service availability and operations ( Logging )
• Security – You know what it means

These guys have developed an intermediate network layer which handles the p2p networking stuff… which has apis that the guys can use.

How do you program a p2p service?

• With Indus
  • Programmin toolkit for p2p services
  • complete backend services – discovery, remote service, subscription, rout3ers, tx managers, nat traversal, etc…
  • customisable routers, listeners and adapters,
  • Integrated bev server to handle both desktop and thin client requests
  • OPEN SOURCE
• Architecture of indus explained – I dont have the image… I’ll try to get the ppt from the man
• indus is a syntactic and semantic layer over the java vm. (K E W L!!!) B-)

Indus network Architecture

• Multiple networks can simultaneously co-exist

There was then a technical explanation of how the system is engineered…  The system does look kind of neat u know…  Their threading mark looks good… No more notify() and notifyAll() for threading models!!! Yaay!!!  The SDK is free to use…

Tats session 2!!!!

Session 1: Venture Capitalists – Sequoia Capital

The things that venture capitalists look for when they invest money!!! Their idea is about helping guys like us by funding our ideas…  These are the 10 things that they look for b4 investing in a guy…

1. Large markets – Address Existing markets poised for rapid growth
2. Team DNA – ‘A’ level founders attract ‘A’ level teams
3. Clarity of purpose – Summarize company’s business on the back of a business card
4. Rich Customers – Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium
5. Insane Customer Focus – Customers will buy only a simple product with singular value proposition.
6. Pain Killers – Pick an issue of burning importance and delight the customer with a compeling proposition
7. Think Differently – Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions.
8. Agility – Stealth and speed will usually help beat out large companies
9. Frugality – Focus spending on what’s critical
10. Inferno – Huge market with customers yearning for product developed by great engineers  requires very little firepower…

Tats for session 1…

Barcamp Bangalore 2.0 Live!!!

Heya all, Live Blogging from BarcampBangalore 2.0…  Lets see how many sessions I can pull out onto the net!!!  The atmosphere is really kewl here.. .in the ThoughtWorks office in Diamond District.  A huge number of sessions have been lined up for, some of them are reeeeeeeeeeally reeeeeeeeeeally interesting to ttend, listen and unconference…  Lets see… I’m waiting 4 the sessions on Hacking, P2p Information Services, Web 2.0 Business Models… the list is on….  Lets see what happens today and tomorrow….