One of the running jokes before my visit to India was the spicy food. Kalyan was trying to convince me that there was a chilli chicken dish that would "burn my ass." (The origin of that is really Neal from Yahoo! Japan, who had an ass-burning experience after eating way too much of the stuff.)
Aren't you glad I shared that little story?
Anyway, as Kalyan notes several of us went to RR's last night for dinner. The food was quite good. It was the first meal so far here that contained rice instead of bread. We had a variety of spicy chicken bits and some fish--all good.
In other words, the food here is most excellent. And the folks in Yahoo's Bangalore office know how to treat visitors from the U.S. Thanks, guys!
In about 14 hours (at 2:30am local time), we'll hopefully board a plane for the first leg of our return trip to the U.S. It's hard to believe the week is almost over already. But, hey, I got to sign shirts yesterday! And I even got the chance to interview a job candidate this morning.
On a low bandwidth, high latency network connection (like the one at the conference here in Bangalore), it's readily apparently that my blog would load way faster it the content was compressed.
Mental note: Install mod_gzip on web server soon. Very soon.
To those of you who read my web site from half way around the world on a regular basis: why didn't anyone point this out sooner? Seriously. It's a simple thing I can do to make your life a tiny bit better.
I was gonna write a summary of day 1 and day 2 separately but didn't have time. Damned jet lag and cold and stuff. Anyway, I'll start out by pointing you at a few day #1 write-ups: Atul Chitnis and Yahoo's very own Kalyan Varma.
When we arrived at the conference on day 1 (Tuesday), I was surprised by how many folks showed up. There was a massive line. Thousands of people. According to what I've read, more people showed up for day 1 this year than the entire conference last year.
In no time, Kalyan began introducing me to members of the Bangalore Linux community--and many from beyond. I spent a lot of the time being a "booth babe" for the Yahoo booth, but I managed to attend a few talks anyway. I saw Nat and Miguel talk about Linux on the desktop. I was especially interested in the real-life deployments they covered in various countries. I also got a preview of KDE 3.2 in another talk.
I met a lot of interesting people at the booth. At least a dozen folks came up to introduce themselves and mentioned that they read by blog. Cool! Thanks for dropping by to say hi.
I also met a guy who was visiting from Dubai. He asked if "famous" people like Rasmus made a lot more money at Yahoo. Heh. That sparked an interesting discussion in which I learned that Linux sysadmins in Dubai apparently make 2 to 3 times as much as their Windows counterparts. So, if you're looking for a good paying job as a Linux admin, head over to Dubai! :-)
At lunch time, we headed over to Windsor Pub for lunch with Madhu. After a bit of beer and some light chow, we headed back for the second half of the day. After some talks a more booth time, we headed out for drinks. Amusingly, we ended up back at the same place, but as Kalyan notes, we had a ton more people there--including Nat and Miguel. Chaos and fun ensued.
Today I presented two brand new MySQL talks for an audience of roughly 250 people. First off was MySQL Optimization and Scaling Tips and the second was MySQL New Features. Slides will be on later, as the WiFi network at the conference is way to anal. (We get outbound port 80 but *nothing* else. No SSH or https. Grr.)
The talks went well for first-time presentations. I had a lot of good questions and small group discussions after the talks. After a bit of lunch I decided to crash in the booth, see if the network was alive, and maybe post an entry.
I had hoped to post my newest pictures, I can't rsync or SCP 'em to the server yet. I guess it's too bad I never thought to leave an SSH server running on port 80 somewhere.
Bangalore has a ton of passionate Open Source folks here. I'm blown away by the crowds of people and the number of them stopping by the Yahoo both (picture later) to say hi. Oh, the folks from Linux For You magazine dropped by to interview me. So I'll go do that and post this later.
I'm enjoying my time in India. The food positively rocks.
Oh, it appears we've been /.'ed too. Heh.