Then Mary Colvig, Chris Hofmann, Myk Melez, and I headed over to Bangalore for FOSS.IN. This trip started as a fallout from Chris’ and SethB’s trip to India, Seth did quite a bit of pre-flight lifting for our project day at FOSS.IN, too. Nothing compared to the in-flight lifting that Mary did, though. If you meet Mary, take a day off and get her full coverage. Three thumbs up for Mary, she pulled of huge things to keep her show ponies safe and sound, and fixed anything beyond just that to make Mozilla a great project to have at FOSS.IN.

As always, I think, Mozilla was well received at the conference. I didn’t see any kind of anymosities between ‘linux’ and ‘us’, rather the opposite. We had the usual flock of schwag, including bags of buttons, all of which were picked up quickly, and worn throughout the conference.

Apart from our project day (more on that below), I spent my time mostly on the corridors (if not hiding in the speakers lounge to do some fx3b2 prep work, the wifi was best there), I didn’t attend too many talks. The corridors were really valuable, though. I learned a whole lot about the Indian community, at large, for Mozilla, for l10n, and for Mozilla l10n. And for all the stuff that I didn’t get, I have contacts now to figure it out. I met, like, in real life and stuff, Kartik, Runa, Prasad, Sankarshan, and that’s just the localization bunch that I still have the names for.

There was quite a bit of discussions about l10n tools, too, most notably with Dimitris of Fedora and Karunakar of indlinux.org. The latter was in a BOF, and we talked about possible tools to assist in getting Indic localizations more consistent. It’s going to be interesting to watch that, as most localization ecosystems face that challenge. Dimitris just returned from Open Translation Tools 07 in Zagreb. He has three blog entries on that. There’s hope for some conversion and discussion in the field, that should be good. I had a chat with Dimitris and Jens Petersen from Fedora about l20n, too. More to come.

For the Mozilla project day, we kinda had two, the official Mozilla project day, and the Friday, which started off with a Hack-a-thon (two bugs fixed, one bug filed, bug links welcome), and then had Mitchell’s and Myk’s talk in the afternoon. At least it felt like project day two for those that attended all. From what I heard on the corridors, both talks were well received. The project day went good, too. Recap is a tad harder than it should be, but the schedule on the foss.in website isn’t the one we used, so I’m without notes. We did cover hacking (Prasad, Anant), accessibility (Krishnakant), spreading Firefox (Mary), testing Mozilla in India (chofmann), localization — Kartik stepped in for sick Ankit, the talk didn’t change that much, though — and me. Myk gave a talk, too, but beat me with a stick, all I remember is that it’s the baseline for his talk on Friday. As an excuse, I was having my talk, too, so I focused on that. All talks were recorded, and the tapes are in the attic.

The overall lesson learned is that fixing bus live is cool. I did that in my talk on the project day, and Myk did so in his talk on Friday, too. Sounds like something worthwhile thinking about for FOSDEM, too. The conferences are kinda similar in look and feel, I bet we can get score with a talk that actually ends up in a patch.

The other honorable mention goes to Prasad’s talk, in particular for coming up with the best xulrunner example seen so far. He created a calculator, in easy to digest incremental steps, with the final goodie of actual extension support, and a extension that added scientific functions and an overlay to access those. And all that in half an hour. This one was my “wow” of our project day, and I saw chofmann and myk drool, too.

Where’s the beef? Pictures, those tagged fossin2007, and the ones that Mary took.

Lot’s of stuff missed, but better now than never.