A couple of things have kept me away from blogging in the last few weeks. One of them has been about organizing BarCamp Pune 3 and the other my latest ‘weekend project’ – LifeLogger. I presented the concept behind LifeLogger along with a small demo, yesterday at the Barcamp. I received some really good feedback along with a dozen questions about the project. The audience appreciated the idea and I hope I got them thinking about how powerful their data (however trivial) could be.

This time around we crossed the 250 registrations mark at the camp. There was a considerable improvement this time in overall planning and the level of the sessions. Thankfully, technical sessions dominated the event as compared to advertising sessions in the last camp. We are definitely getting better with each event.

This event couldn’t have been successful without the help from the sponsors: ThoughtWorks for the tshirts, Persistent for the venue and hospitality, Codewalla, Bookeazy and AsianLaws.org for their support.

Coming back to the LifeLogger, here are a few screenshots of what the application looks as of today:

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The screenshot above displays the main interface for the LifeLogger UI. Along with the option to search/browse your data, it also provides a graphical representation of the system (i.e. number of searches, browse, blogs read etc for the user).

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The screenshot above displays the search results from the users data. The results are visually depicted in different colors, with each color representing one of the disparate sources (bookmarks/blog/browse URL/search) of the data.

The screenshot above displays the date range browse feature. Various graphs help the user visualize his browsing/reading/search patterns along with the results.

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The screenshot above depicts the browse results for the given date range in the descending order of time.

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One of the cool features of LifeLogger is that when a user browses his data for the date range equivalent to a single day, LifeLogger looks back at the web history data for seven days prior and estimates which URL’s visited during that day are aberrant to the users daily browsing pattern. These results are then displayed separately as ‘Interesting picks of the day’ along with the browse results. These results summarize the key events day.

If you are still reading this post you can learn more about LifeLogger at its homepage. I would love to hear your feedback/suggestions.

Watch his presentations on YouTube: Video1 Video2

Busy organizing, I managed to slip into a few of the sessions :). I finally learnt how to build an eclipse plugin (had thought of doing that months back). There were some great presentations by folks from ThoughtWorks. They shared about their methodologies to agile project management. Their idea of organizing requirements in the form of storyboards really fascinated me. In fact, I now have my own storyboard at work. This certainly is a great way to keep the team updated with what you are working on and how you intend to accomplish it.

Angrez Singh, developer of FireWatir, showcased his latest work.

This time around we decided to do things a lil’ differently, hence we organized a dinner party after the event was done with. It was here that the we conceived the idea of organizing the ‘HackCamp‘ in the coming months. This event would cater to all the hackers, crackers and coders out there. No presentations. No sessions. Just pure code/mods/hacks. I’ll post more about this as soon as we get things going.

Don’t forget to check out the videos and pics from the event.

All of us here at Pune are gearing up for another BarCamp to be held sometime around December. Just one of the events I look forward to participating in. As again, I’m helping out in organizing it and can assure you that this time it’ll be even better. We are planning a two day event as opposed to the last camp. We need to garner as many speakers as we can, so spread the word, attend, speak and don’t just come for the t-shirts :-)

I’m thinking of showcasing some of the machine learning work I have been doing since the past few months.

Did you like the logo? All thanks to the good ol’ Gimp.

Planning on attending too? Put yourself on the wiki.

I didn’t have a chance to blog live at Barcamp Pune as I was busy organizing it and also trying to hack a firefox extension along with Shodhan. It proved to be quite an experience where I met some innovative individuals. We got a wonderful response for the extension (Recoja) we presented and also some useful feedback on how we could improvise it.

I particularly enjoyed two sessions:

1. Ontology Based Search by Mukul: He explained how concepts could be extracted from documents hence aiding search engines in serving up relevant results.
2. Naive Bayesian Text Classification by Atul: A wonderful session on the probablistic text classification. Unfortunately he could not go into much mathematical details due to lack of time.

If you couldn’t make it this time be sure to register yourself for the next one.

Well, I can showcase something I have been working on…or…maybe talk about some topic I have an insight on. Till I decide on that, why don’t you sign up for attending the BarCamp Pune, if you havn’t done so already?

The theme “Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff” was quite apt wrt the current scenario of the web.

A quick summary of the sessions I attended:

• Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails by Manik Juneja: Quite an eye-opener for web developers giving them an insight of how powerful Ruby on Rails is.
• Rich Internet Applications and Flex by Ramanarayanan K and Manish Jethani: An introduction to Macromedia RIA’s was given followed by a live demostartion by Manish where he built a YouTube player using Flex. Flex proved to be quite promising due to its ease and platform independence.
• Making AJAX applications faster by Jonathan Boutelle: IMHO one of the most impressive presentations. Jonathan introduced us to the concepts of prefetching/preloading in terms of making AJAX applications faster. He pointed out that the decision of the amount of data to prefetch was purely heuristic and application specific.
• Can we trust next generation web applications by Kapil Bhatia: Kapil brought out some subtle points regarding trust in the current web scenario. This led to open discussions about reliability of some trusted web applications and whether we could trust them with our data. We also discussed about the sustainability of mash-ups coming to the conclusion that in the mashup ecosystem the data owner is the boss.
• How Bloggers Make Money by Amit Agarwal ‘ProBlogger’: Quick tips by a professional blogger from Agra on how to monetize your blogs and tyurn it into a cash cow. He compared various monetizing tools like Google AdSense, Chitika and shared his experiences regarding the same. He let out the tricks for search engine optimization of blog posts.
• Blogging Network – None of us are as smart as all of us by Ajay Sanghani: Ajay, from ITVIDYA.com, introduced us to his blogging network ITVIDYA. He brought across a very valid point that wealth earned through blogs not only consisted of the dollars from cpc but also of the social/business networking that may result.
• Web 2.0 & Power of Default by Prashant: Survival strategies of the Default were discussed concluding that the Default is the way and its here to stay. Paticipants debated on the revenue models for the Web 2.0 concluding that advertising was not the only alternative (37Signals being one of the Web2.0 companys which has a concrete revenue model other than advertising).
• Knowledge Management 2.0 – Applying structured blogging to knowledge management by Manish Dhingra: The core of the presentation was to familarise all with the concept of structured blogging. Manish also revealed WordPress and Movable Type plugins to facilitate structured blogging. One advantage of structured blogging was to clearly differentiate between normal posts and special posts like reviews etc. This would ease the machine readability of such posts. He emphasised on Knowledge Management at the corporate level talking about the corporate-level blogs and the driving force behind them.
• Elements of Web 2.0 – Micro-content, Mobiles and Communities by VeerChand Bothra: One of the lone presentations which spoke about Mobile 2.0. Veer elaborated on the concept of MoBlogs and generation of micro-content which is independent of the platform be it th web or the mobile. He also gave the first public demo of his project MyToday. At the first glance MyToday looks like any other feed aggregator. But the twist lies in the fact that it aggregates news based on sources rather than on the content of the posts (complementary to what Google News does).
• Developing MVC based AJAX applications by Kapil Mohan: The use of MVC design pattern on the client-side was quite innovative. Advantages of it were quite evident, reorganising sloppy javascript code into a modularised, manageable code. The Model-View-Controller architecture facilitates pin pointing errors making javascript debugging a lot more easier.
• Open source Web application testing with WATiR by Angrez Singh: Another interesting presentation for all the Ruby geeks. Angrez presented the easiness with which web applications could be tested using WATiR. He pointed out its advantages over other commercial testing tools which are ‘record and play’ based. He also exhibhited the extension they had developed at Persistent Systems to extend WATiR for Firefox (currently WATiR works only with IE).

The success of BarCamp Delhi will eventually trigger other BarCamps throughout India. Atleast I know that BarCamp Pune is on the charts. Anyone interested?