Notes on ILUGC March Meet and Wikipedia Chennai Meetup 5

I attended this meet and kept typing in my observations to keep myself completely concentrated about what is being said. This has been sitting as a text file in my drive without purpose, so I thought it would be better taken care online.

3:50PM: Introduction by T.Shrinivasan
3.52PM: Technical talk 1: Swift by Yogesh
      OpenStack - Swift - Object Storage Component
      -> public cloud
      -> private cloud, home server, admistration
      -> VMs
      -> Image Server
      -> Volatile machines -> Virtual hard disk -> Block Storage -> Amazom EBS
      -> Authentication Server -> User permissions
      -> Object storage -> data stored in

Slide 1: Introduction
* Object Storage
* Analogous to AWS S3
* API based access only - no mount, no format, no file system - recent developements give a illusion of file system - Pyhton running over Aapache
* Major Usage - Media and Big Data Storage

Slide 2: Use Cases
* Media Storage
* Big Data Storage
* Backup and archival
* Conten Delivery
* Data distribution

Slide 3: Features
* REST based API
* versioning
* Scalable and distributed
* Redunant( Replications ) - Minimum of 3
* Streaming Support
* Cheap( community Servers )

Slide 4: Components
* Proxy Server - gateway to use the system - autheticates using authetication server
* Account Server - holds info about containers
* Container Server - hold info about object
* Object Server -  holds the actual data
* Rings - Hashing of the data
* Caching Server - caching data and authetication code

Slide 5: Contribution
* Contibutor's License agreement
* Fork from Github / Pull Request
* Patches / Bug Fixes
* Python

Slide 6: Getting Help
* Mailing Lists
* Blogs & Social Media
* Documentation
* IRC
* Meetups - meetup.com

4.26PM: Wikimedia India Chapter - Bala Jeyaraman (SodaBottle)
        Overview about the Wikipedia related talks
        * Introduction to Bala and Surya Prakash

4.31PM: State of Tamil Wikipedia - Surya Prakash
    * What is Wikipedia? - Online Refrence Wikipedia
    * Contributors and what they do?
    * Statistics about the Wikipedia usage
    * Contibutors - Who they are? What they do? 
    * Edits - What are wikipedia edits?
    * What do you achieve by editing wikipedia?
        - Writing style and fluentcy
        - Team work and co-operation
        - Critical thinking and analysis
        - Global Society
    * Other Wikipedia Projects
        - Wiki Source
        - Wiki Books
        - WikiPedia
        - Wikimedia Commons
        - Wiki News
        - Wiki Quotes
        - Wiktionary
    * What wikipedia is not?
        - a dictionary
        - a text book
        - an archive
        - an advertisement board
        - a chat room
        - a blog
        - a campign tool
        - a correction tool
        - a research publication
        - an experimental tool
    * User Contibution
        - Writing a new article
        - Translation from other language wikipedia articles
        - Structuring the esssays 
        - Wikifying the content
        - Referencing
        - Updating the content
        - Administartion work ( by Administrators )
        - Introducing Wikipedia to others
        - Coding by Programmers
        - Adding Media
        - User Opinions
        - Verification of work
        - Graphic Files & Sound files
    * Tamil Input in Tamil Wikipedia

5.02PM: Copyright of Content contributed to Wikipedia - BalaJeyaraman answering to queries

5.21PM: State of Wikimedia India Chapter - Bala Jeyaraman

5.35PM: Interactive session

6.30PM: Exchanged pleasentaries and dispersed. Two college students tugged around me and I ended up talking non-stop 30-40mins about coding and GSoC