Woke up late as usual. had a fantastic breakfast of batura-sized puris and sukhi aloo bhaji at kamat hotel (famous all over india), situated very close to my hotel. served fresh and hot in under 5 mins.! had tea (burnt tongue on first sip). hailed an auto and boy! "Palace Grounds, Vasanthnagar Entrance" really works...works accurately...and works cheaper. on the way noticed a banner reading "Techforte '05" in front of MCC. Reached the venue at the tail end of "Python and TurboGears" talk by Swaroop CH. from the few mins. i got to listen, he speaks clearly and is quite cool and confident...Yahoo!! :). Next i switched to "Google:Powered by Linux" (their 2nd presentation).Every revelation of Google's technology leaves you like "WOW!!", "AWESOME!", "Does this really happen on planet earth?" and at the same time they release enough info that still look like teasers. Then was Nirav Mehta talk on OpenLaszlo. He's on of my faves for the way he presents & interacts with the audience. Wish I could have such command over audience when i'm probably havin' my metal concert (one day...d-day). More about OpenLaszlo and Glancer in another post.

I went to check out the wikipedia talk...more like a line-by-line recital of what's on screen...and there was so much on screen. The thing that I'm really bugged about here is that wikipedia is of, for and by the masses and masses are the most restless in such narrative classes. Even a more summarized presentation can work wonders if speaker is not so comfortable at presenting ot audience (probably also due to null or incorrect feedback that prevents a speaker from polishing his skills and being "better than perfect". So i shifted back to PHP track to see Rasmus Lerdorf (keeps the interest going) for large-scale PHP, basically showing (off) Yahoo! Maps (i think). Also he presented differences in coding in PHP4 and PHP5. Also designed a histogram of visitors per hour per page using just PHP. The best part of the presentation was that he was presenting using his own presentation system, which apparently is also designed to dynamically present output of PHP code.

Attended BoF on Python, met Ramdas (would-be) ex-editor of DeveloperIQ magazine and had quite an interesting discussion. I'd planned the entire but skipped the last one "AJAX w/ PHP" so i could come back to the LUG stall and charge my cell phone. Stupid hotel doesn't have a proper power outlet where the adapter fits or gets power supply, So all this time, I spent writin' this shit (and the entry about glancer), I charged up my cell pretty much and it's already past 1900. so now onto next day