I found this cool tool called Desktoptopia (beta) doing a great job on selecting a right desktop wallpaper from awesome collections. It’s tiny, nifty and cool. It can change my wallpapers at given intervals, or allows manual change as well. You can find loads of wallpaper collection which are configurable with your tiny tray utility.

Download Desktoptopia

Session : Women in IT By Kavita Vemuri, Technical Manager, IIIT-H

Kavita Vemuri delivered a splendid Off-beat topic on Women in IT and problems and how people think different, studies and statistics. The statistics that were demoed are very compelling.

She also talked on how things are seen from Women perspective.

I think this is one of MUST NOT MISS session for most of the barcampers out there. It really helps them to mature in their views about fellow women workers in IT field. She hit the nail on the right point where the word “Diversity” is becoming a multi-definition word as per people’s comfirtness in this corporate jungle.

She has also pin pointed on the need for Gender Insensitive policies rather than Gender Sensitive policies.

I liked the quote on her last slide

“They” Say : Women are key to economic growth, but then they keep changing the lock !!

Disclaimer from Kavita : “They” –> Governments

Session : Amit Aggarwal talks about Build a Successful Blog.

Amit talks about his experiences around doing blogging for living….i.e Professionally…he is a well known tech blogger who get indexed by techmeme.com from India.

He blogs @ labnol.org.

Amit has shared his invaluable blogging experience such as keeping the visitors in touch, focusing on content, frequency of blogging, Using Google Alerts, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)  etc. Definitely a good session for young tech bloggers out there.

-more to come

Happy BarCamping !

Session : Lighting the Web, Silverlight 2 By M.S.V Janakiram, Microsoft.

I somehow feel people tend to show MS as a devil and people doesn’t like them, but the fact remains that they use MS technology in and out in thier life. This session was started with a disclaimer that Janakiram will be talking much about generic technology but not specific to Microsoft ! (In Contrast …Check the ealier session I covered in Part – 3 of this series.) Community Spirit seems to be UnCommunitized now !

This session is focusing on Rich Internet Application platform and usage of SilverLight. Janakiram started with Quote “Media is embracing the Web” and a mind blowing movie trailer demo with high definition sound effects using Silverlight on Fox Movies website. and… there it comes A jazzy bollywood, tollywood movie application shown with high definition video experience in Firefox.

Janakiram described how do developers and designers co-exist and work together using Rich Internet Application platforms like Silverlight and Microsoft Expression and Visual Studio .NET 2005.

Janaki has demoed an application mashup built-upon Google Maps and Silverlight which shows the movie trailers on the pin points of movie theatres across Hyderabad.

-more to come

Happy BarCamping !

Hysea Representatives talked on their activities and events. Boring  for developers like me !

Session : Prasad Y, CMD of  teleonto talking about his experiences about Product development. Boring again. More like self perspective session and people seems to be taking an unofficial break in Bar Camp….:-)

I will take a break too….

-Happy BarCamping !

Session : Building Low Cost Scalable Web Apps – Ramesh Rajamani, Compassites, Bangalore.

Session seems to be focussing on High Availability, Performance and Storage solutions planning for such demanding applications. I feel, this session is more technology centric rather than practice centric (which I hate to listen in events like barcamp where people think technology is just a way to implement systems).

Most of the things sound obvious to me and few things are going above my head.

One funny thing…the speaker talks about Amazon S3 to save time on performance while S3 is sleeping in woods at the same time

more to come….signing off for now…

-Happy Blogging

The first session is kicked off post introductory welcome by Ramesh Loganathan, VP, Pramati.

Sanjeev is doing Behavioral Driven Development  (BDD) now. He is from a little startup called “Corners“

This session started with Test Driven Development introduction…

BDD focuses more on defining the behavior of the system rather than designing the code. This comes out when developer thinks about system in terms of domain specific language (DSL).

The session was planned to end with a demo with Ruby On Rails with BDD, but for some reasons the demo was not given.

I just looked back in to hall…and…..WOW ..I can see too many Students

- Happy BarCamping…

9:30 AM : I reached Google’s office at around 9:30 AM. Entry is super smooth (took just 5 mins including an official entry for my laptop) with pleasant welcome from Google’s reception.

Googlers turned their Cafe in to BarCamp conference hall to accommodate large set of audience. The first instant benefit I got from Google the moment I entered in to thier office is “GOOGLE GUEST WIFI”. No Hungama, nothing. I had to enter my email id and nothing else. I am connected to a high-speed internet pipe on the fly. 

Seating seems to be not so good as it’s a canteen. I am not sure if I can sit for long in these fibre chairs. I also observed that there are no power hubs down on the floor as its a canteen in real. Google has quickly arranged few Power strips to us.

10:00 AM :  Conference agenda is being prepared. There is a big Queue out side the office and folks are checking in….

more in next part…

Happy Barcamping !

Mac Book Air measures at 0.76 inches thickness as it’s front line feature. Well that feature comes with some sacrifice too. There will be no Optical Drive ! This optical drive comes at an additional cost of 5500 Rs which cannot be used with any other PCs or Laptops.

The Technical Specifications are as follows…

Screen Size : 13.3 inches (LED Backlit)

Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo

Hard disk : 4200rpm (slow) – 80 GB  – [ 64 GB Solid State Drive is Optional ]

Ethernet, Firewire, Media Card Slots – MISSING !

USB Drive : Just 1

Battery : Not Replaceable (like in iPod) 

Expected Price : 96,100 Rs.

I seriously doubt, how reliable is this so called “Single Sign On” solution for the Web 2.0.

Poor exception handling ? Huh ?

Try the following page once you are done with PicLense Installation.

Now It’s the India turn ?

Read more at NG Web

Here you go for a little tool that adds a very cool option to GTalk menu “Always Idle”. gAlwaysIdle adds a menu option to your IM client so that you get your privacy back.

Download gAlwaysIdle

Listen to the Song here

Song Lyrics are as follows…

‘VS-indenting
Module VB
Dim myvar As Integer?() = {3 * 3}
Sub Main()
For Each i In myvar
      Console.Write("Hello VB")
With i
       Console.Write(.Value)
End With REM a language so true
If i IsNot Nothing Then
               Console.WriteLine()
End If REM
            Console.Write(<some>xml</some>)
Next
End Sub
End Module

Xobni Insight is a tool/addon for Microsoft Outlook which makes it atleast 10 times productive. It does a faster email search (Can I uninstall Windows Desktop Search?), Builds a relational database on your contacts, the files and conversations. More to add…It is probably the first “Social” software built on Outlook (I don’t consider Plaxo as one )

Download Xobni Today to Power your Outlook

Play as much as you can @ http://www.fxlabs.com

Storm CD Perfect Edition 3.0 does the above magic for you.

Go Get It

Enter your package number in to google search box and hit submit…

Google suggests you the links to track the package automatically…

Install Google Toolbar 5 Beta

One the toolbar is installed, you will be prompted something like this. If you enable this, You are ready to carry all the stuff you do on your computer to anywhere.

With new Google Bookmarks integration, Google has almost challenged del.icio.us bookmarking system seriously. If Google could make it’s toolbar users addictive to their bookmarking system, I am sure everything else will be done automatically.

Google Browser Sync addresses this issue by syncing up all of your settings to any computer you intend to use. All you need is a tiny plugin installed on your browser.

Well it doesn’t work with Firefox 3 Beta.

Sync Wizard

Sync Tool Status

Download Google Browser Sync for Firefox 1.5+ (!= 3.0)