Feb 12, 2009
Chintalgiri Shashank hasn’t been sleeping much. When he’s not building a satellite for ISRO or helping organize TechKriti 2009 (for which sethb and I are in town), he’s Mozilla’s Campus Rep. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK). And a full time Master’s student there in the physics department.
IITK’s annual TechKriti festival seems to have increased this place’s cranial buzz (if that’s possible). We hear about the “Build Your Own Supercomputer” project, in which students take some NVIDIA GPU components and string them together to do complex calculations, powered by hardware from the local market in Kanpur. Then we actually witness some guys tinkering away on robots — Shashank tells me they’ve been up for two nights trying to get their robots to do stuff. I’m in town with sethb to give a talk about the Open Web. I’ve got some experimental stuff to show off from Mozilla, too.