A Weekend that wasn't so gloomy

This weekend, I have been following up with everything that I've been doing over the week in my spare time. I decided to do some real coding and come up with something creative that I could probably deploy even at work. The result is something quite nice where I've pieced together the initial ingredients for what should become a useful toolbox for embedded system/user-space applications. Part of my drive was to create a usable replacement for busybox which almost stands out as the single swiss-army-knife that embedded linux deployments use.

At this stage I haven't started a project page and involved more people, but through the next week that should be possible.

I was also tweaking the iwp3945 drivers as I had quite some trouble getting my custom kernel working on my laptop with wireless access enabled. Pairing with the AP wasn't ever happening. While all this was on, I needed to move a heavy table near my desktops and pulled a muscle and probably tore a ligament in my back. I took some rest finally and feeling much better am just trying to cruise on with the code after reading some interesting articles on anthropology.

It seems that the product I've been working on at office would finally hit the road after one last weekend of stress testing. I haven't heard someone screaming for help which means there is a stable set of system software that should be able to take it without surprises.

On Saturday, I met up with a friend after quite a while having some time to have a long conversation with both of us not too busy. I did experience the horrific traffic on MG Road in Bangalore in an Auto (Driving my Car was out of the question.) This being a Saturday, it was probably amplified thanks to the inching work on the Bangalore metro project.

Foss.in

Today, I spent time actually listening to people on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FOSS/FLOSS) at the Foss.in Conference. It was a nice experience listening to many of the speakers. I enjoyed Rusty's talk more than anything else. The event had some strange things. The sponsors (including IBM, Sun, Google, ABB, GMI/Trolltech, Redhat and others) were seriously headhunting.

The organisation (of the event) had its share of technical snags. The one thing that did function right was WiFi access to all the delegates. The rest was a bit shabby but better than all the earlier events. I also got to meet a few old friends and acquaintances. In some ways my hacker (MIT sense of the word, wanting to write code that adds features/solve problems in a cool way) side was ignited.

It was also different from a normal day at work which also added up. I am feeling a bit bad that I wouldn't be attending a "want to be there" talk tomorrow by Harald Welte. But hopefully that should be doing something nice at work.