Know the speakers: Ramakrishna Reddy
Feb 18th
Please give a brief introduction of yourself.
I’m currently a Senior Engineer with Red Hat. Prior to that was an Independent Consultant, consulting in Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Indic Text processing. I’m a Free Software, Agile, extreme programming evangelist and am involved with the IndLinux project (http://www.indlinux.org) . My interests lie in Open Source Scripting languages, I18N and l10N of software applications. Web Application development, Functional Programming and Databases.
What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?
Mostly the Low hanging fruit ones 
. I have a few projects at http://sourceforge.net/users/ramkrsna/ . Now a days I maintain a few python modules for the fedora project, you can get them here http://ramkrsna.fedorapeople.org/fedora/ . I’m also the primary maintainer for the Hunspell Kannada dictionary.
What will your workshop be, exactly ?
The age old problem of Problem Solving.
What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this workshop? What do you expect ?
It will give an overview to the participants about different kinds of possibilities to store data . It would also try to address different pros and cons of data storage. Types of Optimization strategies and Algorithms to be used while facing different types of data. Python would be used as powerful tool to demonstrate the above.
What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people working on their first contribution to any FOSS project ?
Grok the Source, read as much code as possible. Do not be afraid to
fork a project. Seek active contributors, share the success and responsibilities. Pick a religion and worship it, Use Emacs. Religion in this case is the Church of Emacs.
Why did you chose python over other programming languages ?
Its was the next best thing after Slice Bread 
. The language is simple yet so powerful. It caters for all kinds of audience. I.e If you have been used scripting before, you can program in python without any knowledge of Object Oriented Programming. Personally, coming for working in computational linguistics and functional programming background. I found Python to be closer among its modern peers, python is truly “A Poor Man’s LISP “. Though PERL was a choice, but when it comes to readability I find GPG signatures more readable than PERL code.
How do you use python in your day-to-day activities. ?
Luckily for me. My employer Red Hat swears by Python. Python is used
for both fun and profit.
What advice will you give to programmers moving from other languages to python ?
Moving from one programming language to another is more of a personal choice. Knowing programming methodologies is more important than the language itself. If you are racing against time, trying to pick up a new language python has an advantage with a leaner learning curve and cleaner syntax. Also for developers , who would love rapid prototyping. The language comes with all batteries included. Also has power third party tools, Scipy, NumPy, Twisted.
Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?
This is going to be my 4th GNUnify. Its amazing that the college students and staff along with the PLUG members pull off a professionally run conference year after year. Love the energy levels of the conference.
Know your speakers: Amit Karpe
Feb 18th
Please give a brief introduction of yourself.
I am promoter and evangelist of GNU/Linux and FOSS. I am an active member of PLUG since 2001. I am also active in CSLUG, IT Milan various Bar Camps and FOSS communities. I had worked on Ubuntu and Edubuntu for Intel’s Classmate PC and HCL’s MiLeap Leaptop.
I also like to do social work in my free time.
What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?
I had organized various FOSS and Community based events like Drupal Camp, Software Freedom Day, IT Milan Seminar, Internship Mela. Also helped in events like GNUnify, Joomla Day, PHPCamp, BarCamp. I had
helped Intel and HCL to launch there product with Ubuntu.
Also I help Seva Sahayog and various other NGOs and organizations to adopt FOSS.
What will your talk be, exactly ?
Talk will be introduction of Beagle Board and building system for Embedded Linux. This system can be anyone can use for application development and testing. Where I will cover basics of ARM, fundamentals of Beagle Board, Linux booting and filesystem, Kernel basics, use of qemu and GNU toolchain.
What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect ?
Audience should get introduce to beagle board and various options for embedded system development. So in future if they want to build any embedded or mobile ( smart phone ) OS then they can use Beagle Board
as platform. As we all know ARM is 90% market for embedded and mobile. So anyone who want to try with Android, Maemo ( or MeeGo ) can use beagle board as first reference platform.
I expect audience should connect to Beagle Board community and start small activities.
Why did you choose beagle board over other options ?
As Beagle Board have very good community and also TI have good support for BB. So as reference platform BB is best. Beagle board is affordable too, it costs Rs. 9,000/- only. So anyone can start prototyping his idea. Beagle board has good documentation. There are several projects and distributions available for Beagle board
Which important features of beagle board can make beagle board the choice of masses?
Beagle Board is a low-power, low-cost Single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments. Designed and developed with open source development in mind, to demonstrate the Texas Instrument’s OMAP 3530 (ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and TMS320C64x+ DSP) system-on-a-chip. It is like a miniature computer, with all basic functionality and support for various connectors and peripherals. Beagle board can run Windows CE, Linux (Android, Angstrom, Debain and Ubuntu) or Symbian.
The most important feature is Beagle Board have very active community.
What obstacles did you face while implementing your first application with beagle board ?
Though Beagle Board has very good documentation, I jumped too working on Beagle Board. I was facing problem with connecting peripherals. We ended with burned board, by using wrong power supply.
How do you see open hardware design evolve over next five years ?
With explosion of Web and Mobile technologies, everyone is taking help of Open Source. Now in world of Mobile/smartphone and various MID/Netbook/Tablet industry want to collaborate. They want to use crowd wisdom, hence in next five years you should see more open hardware design. Be it Arduino, Hawk Board, Beagle Board every one will follow open hardware design.
have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify.
Yes 100%. From first GNUnify I am part of this vibrant event. I had meet so many great FOSS community leaders, contributors, participators, promoters. Few speakers had change my world. Specially RMS, Niyam Bhushan, Danese Cooper and Valsa Williams.
Know the speakers: Senthil Kumaran S
Feb 18th
Please give a brief introduction of yourself
I am a subversion developer who is passionate about Free software. I did my under graduation in Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. Right from my college days I was interested in Free software and attracted towards its philosophy. During college days we gave a complete free software based solution for day to day activities using free software technologies (http://www.stylesen.org/tcenet_best_innovative_project_of_the_year_2007_by_pcquest), which was the time when my Free software journey started.
What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?
I develop subversion which is one of the most popular free software project today. I am the Second Indian Full committer for this project and had contributed some features especially things like password/passphrase caching using GNOME Keyring. Almost all softwares which I worked with are FOSS and available for download. Another notable contribution was TCENet which fetched my team “The Most Innovative Project of the Year” award from PCQuest competing with the software majors. I have a rank (900+) too in ohloh 
What will your talk be, exactly ?
I will be presenting two talks. First one is “Collaborative Software Development” which is based on my experience in developing free softwares and CollabNet’s products which are based on Collaborative software development environment. Second will be on my area of interest “Version Control Systems” in which I ll explain version control systems in layman terms and touch upon the two major types of version control system existing today centralized and distributed.
What do you hope to accomplish by delivering this talk? What do you expect ?
I would like to make people, understand about collaborative environments for software development and emphasis on the usefulness of version control systems which will help them to develop softwares in a smart way.
What kind of tools you are developing at collabnet ?
We develop “Subversion”! CollabNet has products such as “CollabNet Enterprise Edition” which is legacy now, and the future is “CollabNet TeamForge”. If you don’t understand what these tools are visit tigris.org, openoffice.org, java.net. These are just the community sites (there are lots more), but CollabNet supports many Software companies to manage their projects and provides an environment for them to collaborate.
With so many new open source version controls available, how do you think Subversion will handle the competition ?
At last we have some real competitors But this is fun since we are part of advancing the “State of the Art”! Think about a world with just Coke, it would have been boring, thats why Pepsi came in, the same thing happens in the version control industry we have DVCS now. But there are lot of advantages of using Subversion in corporate environment, when you attend my talk you can get a clear picture of these differences.
What kind of projects you recommend to be based on Subversion, instead of other version control systems ?
When you are new to Version control and you have a large team in a corporate environment Subversion suits your needs. If you want a ready to go, simple to learn and easy to use Version control system, then Subversion fits your bill. You can rely on Subversion for project of any sizes.
What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people working on their first contribution to any FOSS project ?
No patch is trivial! You are making a difference!
Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?
This is my first GNUnify, I expect a lot of fun and excited about meeting new people from the Free Software world
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