I was supposed give a tutorial about Hadoop and Pig today at SRII-India ICSEM 2012 conference today which is happening at Infosys campus in Mysore.
But unfortunately I was not able to attend it due a logistic nightmare created by the travel company used by the conference organizers.
I spent more than 10 hours to prepare the presentation with the demo code. I thought of sharing them here so that it will be useful for someone who wants to get started with Hadoop and Pig.
Last weekend, a couple of us from computer club (read hardware enthusiasts) met together to discuss about the different development boards available and also to learn from each other.
Boards
The following are the list of development boards that we discussed during the hackthon.
I spoke about Arduino and also discussed about the different capabilities of Arduino. You can view the slides that I used for my talk in my slideshare account. I have also embedded it here for easy reference. You can also checkout my other presentations and slides from my talks page.
Hacks
After the talks, we decided to hack the different boards and make them talk with each other. I was able to program the DDK board using Android libraries. I also succeeded in making two Arduino boards talk to each other using I2C (more details about it soon). After the hackthon I am also currently working on making both the Arduino and DDK talk to each other using I2C. Will let you know guys once I am able to do it.
Last Thursday, I conducted a workshop about web development and node.js in Girl Geek Dinner event sponsored by Yahoo in Bangalore.
Girl Geek Dinner
Girl Geek Dinner was organized by Yahoo!’s Women in Tech (WIT) group, a grassroots volunteer-led employee organization at Yahoo!. The event is conducted to inspire and support the next generation of technical women.
Slides
You can access the slides that I used for the workshop from my slideshare account. I have also embedded it here for easy reference. You can also checkout my other presentations and slides from my talks page.
Demo source code
I have uploaded the source code of the demo which I used for the workshop to my github account. Feel free to use it in whatever way you want.
Embedding code in presentations
While preparing the slides, I solved a problem, which I wanted to solve for quite sometime (ie) to embed code in the slides with full syntax highlight. I will be writing a separate blog post explaining the same soon. So stay tuned
I just came back from Google Devfestx which happened in Bangalore today. The event was very well organized and I gave a talk on building robots using Android and Arduino. This is a slightly modified version of the talk which I gave at Droidcon. I have added some additional information, especially about NFC and communicating Audio Jacket.
Slides from my talk
You can access the slides of my talk from my slideshare account. I have also embedded it here for easy reference. You can also checkout my other presentations and slides from my talks page.
Demos
I showed a demo of my pet bot Asimi. You can download the source code and learn more about the bot from its homepage.
Due to some problem in the circuit, the demo didn’t work well. I realized that in future, I should always have a video of the demo handy, which I can show in situations like this.
I also showed a demo of a game which I created using a bunch of LED’s all connected together using charlieplexing. Will post more details about it soon.
I just came from Ayana 2012 where I gave a talk about hardware hacking using Arduino.
About Ayana 2012
Ayana is a two day event conducted by PES IT. It starts with tech talks on the first day followed by 24 hour hackthon, similar to Yahoo Open hackdays.
Introduction to hardware hacking using Arduino
In my talk, I first talked about why a software hacker should look into hardware hacking. I then followed it by a brief introduction to Arduino, using the famous Blink program.
After that I was talking about different ways by which you can make Arduino talk to Internet and mobile phones like Android.
In the end I also gave out some hack ideas for the participants.
Slides
I have uploaded the slides that I used during the talk to my slideshare account. I have also embedded it here for easy reference. You can also checkout my other presentations and slides from my talks page.
The talk went well and there were lot of questions after the event, which is generally a good sign
Buying Arduino in Bangalore
As it used to happen in my other talks about Arduino, even today lot of people asked me about places where they can buy Arduino in Bangalore. I have already collect a list of places from where you can buy Arduino in Bangalore. You can refer to that page, in case you are planning to buy Arduino in Bangalore.
Last weekend, I gave a talk at Chennai Geeks meetup about using memcache to scale web applications.
There were lot of good questions and the discussion which followed after the presentation was very good. Thanks for the organizers for putting together a great event.
I have uploaded the slides which I used for the talk to my slideshare account. I have also embedded them below so that you can easily view them.
During the event, there were a couple of open questions that were not answered. I am posting them below with the answers.
What is the Protocol used by Memcache?
Memcahce runs on TCP. But the memcache protocol also has an interface for UDP, which can be used in very large installations.
Does memcache return anything when adding a new item fails?
Memcache actually returns a boolean false, if it encounters any errors while trying to save a value. (I got this completely wrong during the presentation)
Is it possible to store values in one language and retrieve it in another language?
Short answer is yes. Long answer is, it depends on what you are storing. If you are going to store just basic data types like int or string, it should not be a problem. But if you are going to store serialized objects, it could be a problem.
If you have to store serialized objects and use them across multiple languages then try to serialize them using Google protocol buffer.
BTW if I have missed any questions, then let me know and I will answer them here.
About Chennai Geeks
Chennai Geeks is a forum for hackers in Chennai. You can find more information about it from their Facebook page.
The monthly meetup takes places every 3rd Saturday of the month. This was my first meetup and I was pretty impressed with the enthusiasm and the knowledge of the community. I am planning to attend their monthly meetup if possible.
The guys behind BarCamp Chennai, are putting together another event titled FailCamp. If you are wondering what a FailCamp is, here is the quote from the official wiki.
We all make mistakes and learn from it to become a better person. Won’t it be great to learn from other’s mistakes so that we don’t make the same ones!
The focus is really not about the failure. It’s about why we failed and what lessons we learnt from it. Let’s not be ashamed about failing. Let’s celebrate failure. Let’s look straight into its eyes.
If it sounds interesting, head over to FailCamp wiki and register yourself. Here are the details about the event.
Date
November 16 2008 – Sunday
Place
Tenth Planet Technologies Pvt., Ltd.,
#807, P.T.Lee Building, 6th Floor, Anna Salai, (Opposite LIC building)
Chennai-600 002
Driving directions and parking information are available in the wiki. You can also find some pictures of the venue here.
Unconference
Failcamp is also an unconference like BarCamp and everyone will be participating rather than just attending. Even you can help in organizing the event. In the wiki, you can find the list of items that needs to be done and you can pick any one of them that interest you.
I will be attending the event and if possible will talk about the lessons which I learned from one of my pet project King Ping.
Let me know if you are coming and we can meet up and celebrate failures.
Following the photos from pipesCamp, here are the videos which were taken during the event.
pipesCamp hackday competition in full action. Everyone is busy preparing their pipes to get their 3 minutes of fame . You can also find myself, Yuvi and Harish busy preparing the ego search.
Myself and Yuvi presenting ego search for the hackday competition.
Sid presenting his MTC bus mashup during the presentation.
. You can also find myself, Yuvi and Harish busy preparing the ego search. 
