FOSS.IN/2007 Day 1
December 5th, 2007 | by Rajagopal |There were four parallel tracks going on for the First Project Day, viz., Debian/Ubuntu, Mozilla, GNOME and OpenSolaris.
I attended most sessions of Mozilla and one session in Debian/Ubuntu.
The first talk was on Extensibility of Mozilla by Myk. Myk talked about various addons for Mozilla, what they do, and an overview of how it was implemented(whenever the addon was created by him). Some of the new useful addons that I adopted after the talk was Alexa Sparky. Most others were that I already use. The slides are available somewhere in http://people.mozilla.or/~myk/. I too am looking for the exact URL. Please let me know if you have it.
Anant gave a nice, well organized talk on XPConnect. He gave a step by step introduction to get the audience started with a skeleton code generator, and went on to show code snippets to show off the ease of using XPConnect. Slides available here
Next was a talk on writing applications with the Mozilla Framework. It was an awesome talk where Prasad illustrated step by stp on how to build an application using XUL. But it would have been even better if he had chosen the example such that it illustrates how to use both XPCOM and XUL. One new thing that i learnt was that even the applications that are built with the Mozilla Framework have the addon widget, and are extensible. Slides are avaialble here
The last pre-lunch session was regarding Evangelizing for Firefox. Mary showed some interesting pics on how people love firefox, and then introduced Spread Firefox initiative and the events that happen on it to the audience.
Had lunch with a bunch of #linux-india IRC buddies.
Post-lunch, I went to the Debian/Ubuntu track to attend the Debian/Ubuntu package building and maintenance workshop by Baishu and Kartik. Though the content was very good, some audience who were new to packaging wouldn’t have probably understood much of it. It is tough to cater to the needs of everyone, but still the workshop could have been more of a step by step tutorial. The slides are available here
When the workshop on Debian/Ubuntu was over, I dropped back into the Mozilla track, and a couple of short sessions on localization were going on. These talks were by eminent personalities of the Mozilla Community. But just that I wasn’t interested in the topic, I didn’t follow the talks closely. From how much ever I listened to the talks, I was able to get a grasp on how localization happens in the Mozilla Community, and how Firefox3 is going to support localization.
The day ended with a demo of Firefox’s accessibility by Krishnakanth Mane. It was amazing to see that Hindi accessibility works so well. Krishnakanth requested the audience to take necessary initiatives to make their local languages accessible. If any news readers or people good at pronounciation and phonetics are interested in contributing to their own language’s accessibility, please contact krmane at gmail dot com.
