PHPCamp Debrief

Today I attended a technologists' conference called PHPCamp in Pune, India. This gathering follows the Unconference model of self organised presentations. Anyone who is motivated can grab a marker pen and write their name and topic on a central whiteboard.

Due to a slow cautious driver and getting lost on the way our bus trip from Mumbai took almost six hours to cover the barely 200 km distance. This meant that by the time of arrival all presentation slots had been booked. All that was left were Birds of a Feather (BoF) session slots, so I signed up to present my previous talk on Running an Open Source Project.

Then I drifted between several talks, trying to meet interesting people and gauge their knowledge. One of the goals my employer has for sending its people to various conferences is to meet and recruit IT talent. It wasn't long before I found several passionate developers who have an interest in topics relevant to Directi's .pw business unit such as microblogging and social networking.

As it turned out several presenters had left without notice so I was lucky to get a spot in the main hall. The audience for my talk seemed to be well over one hundred. As is the case in India today, very few attendees seemed to have any experience with Free Software and Open Source projects. I'm slowly but surely making it my mission to promote open source among the vast Indian software developer community. The post-talk questions I received were mostly about basic concepts such as licensing: What is the "best" license? What are BSD/GPL/MIT/etc? What is Copyleft? Oh, and I got an invite to come talk at a company in Pune, which could be interesting.

I'm curious about the upcoming FOSS.in conference. Hopefully these events reach a wide audience and help percolate knowledge of open source and free software throughout the IT field in India. At the moment I feel that there is a disproportionate lack of contributorship coming out of India. Once more developers across the subcontinent discover the world of open source and participate in such projects, we are sure to see great things!

Special mention should be made for the wonderful tshirts designed by Directi specially for this event. The "PHP - Pretty Hot Programmer" shirts were a hit!

All in all a successful day trip. And we had lots of fun in the Porsche on the way back. ;-)

Cr for Chrome

I'm sure everyone here has heard about Google Chrome, its new browser. Chrome is Webkit+Javascript as a platform for future applications. Hmm, I wonder who has been advocating this type of platform since forever? ;-)

Now for some performance stats:

Open browser-mips in IE, FF, Cr. And allow me to coin the abbreviation Cr for Chrome since it’s the chemical element Chromium.

My machine’s results:

Internet Explorer 8 beta 2

Firefox 3

Chrome 0.2

However...

For some reason the lawyers at Google were not paying attention when they rubber stamped the Chrome End User License Agreement (EULA). As others have pointed out this EULA makes it impossible to use Chrome without surrendering everything you post, mail, create, or do on the interwebs. So until this is fixed I won't be using, nor recommending, Google Chrome.

From using Chrome since last night I've noticed some bugs. Images don't seem to render completely. For example the contact list on www.pandion.be or the UI icons in GMail are cut off.

My brother's osCommerce site is hopelessly broken. So are Digg comment threads.

The Chrome team was touting their automated testing tools and yet it has so many obvious bugs. I guess testing is not everything.