IIT Kanpur developer workshop using Bespin

We’ve wrapped up our stop at IIT Kanpur.  Arun and I did a developer workshop last night…well, Arun led the workshop and I assisted.  Nearly 150 people attended an we were there until after midnight, working with students for over three hours.  The enthusiasm of the students was inspiring to see, and Arun and I felt very at home with this crew of young Mozillans.  But, what made this workshop so special was that it was the first time the the web-based IDE, Bespin, was used by such a large group.  All things considered, it was a big success.  We found a few bugs, but used Bespin to edit an HTML and JS file using <canvas> to have the students draw an Indian Flag.

One quick bug to report for the Bespin guys.  It seems that there is a limit on the number of people who can login with a project of the same name.  Initially, everyone named their project “IndiaFlag”.  Only a few were able to start and everyone else was locked out.  A sharp student realized the potential bug and made the suggestion to have everyone try to rename their project to a unique name.  That did the trick and the room applauded his fix.  Also, the copy/paste function didn’t seem to work.  Not sure if this is just a limitation of cut/paste with <canvas> or not.

Today, Arun gave a talk on the open web.  I met many of the campus reps here and got a few testimonials on video about their passion for Mozilla.  As I write this, Arun is meeting with a professor interested in the semantic Web.  We are now heading to Mumbai en route to Pune for the GNUify conference where we’ll both speak.

If you attended either of our sessions, please comment here, leaving your name and what you thought.  Arun and I (and Jay and Mary in California) would love to keep in touch.

More from India, now in Kanpur

Arun and I just arrived at the IIT Kanpur and were welcomed by a crew of students led by Shanshank Chintalgiri and Surya, whose last name I didn’t catch.  Surya actually came 2 hours by car to pick us up in Lucknow at the airport.  We had a brief lunch at the Campus Restaurant and then went to the lab where we will host our three-hour workshop tonight.  At that, Arun will lead a sure-to-be spillover audience through a series of exercises where students will demo Bespin (Mozilla’s experimental Web IDE) and run through other exercises with SVG.  We anticipate spillover because last time this team hosted a kernel hacking session, they expected 50 and almost 400 showed up.

Now for some side-candy related to India. I’ve posted picture below that shows some interesting Firefox usage statistics here. These were sent to us by Chofmann to use as a talking point for the various conferences where we will present about Firefox growth.  Chofmann’s commentary:

“This one shows a great pattern of growth over 2008 almost doubling the number of active daily users from 600k to almost 1.2M current. The challenge to the students is to see if they can double the number of Firefox users again in 2009…”

Please keep in mind a few things about these stats:

1. They are a tally of anonymous pings we receive on our update server.
2. The active daily user (ADU) number translates into a higher number of actual end users that is some multiple of the ADU figure. We don’t know that multiple for India and make a guess.
3. The dip right around the year-end 2008/year-beginning 2009 is an IT glitch getting fixed.