pratul dot in /home/lut4rp

I'd really call this a hack :-)

As per the road map to World Domination, the Universe has come together and handed me this totally brilliant opportunity to be a part of Google Summer of Code 2009. After much jubilation and happiness, I figured I have a responsibility to thank some very special people who helped me reach this point, and here they are in no apparent order :-)

- my mum and dad (and perhaps, sister) for raging an unending battle against my obsession for everything geek. And in process, pushing me to my limits :-)
- dear friend, co-drupal-evangelist, co-contributor, co-have-phun-everywhere Gurpartap, who has been a major source of inspiration in my contributions to Drupal.
- my mentor, Simon Roberts (lyricnz), for supporting Vote Up/Down even before I had thought of GSoC.
- countless IRC channel inhabitants from navya, linux-india and drupal for all the pointless talks (which do turn useful at times)

... and a hearty congrats and ^5 to the other 100 awesome participants this year from India. We rock!

Come 12th February, and IIT Kanpur will hold FOSSkriti (under its Techkriti technical festival's banner). As the name quite well puts it, FOSSkriti deals with all Free and Open Source Software. And this time in 2009, we'll see workshops and sessions on Mozilla technologies, HTML 5, Sahana, YUI and yes, Drupal!

Me and Gurpartap will be leading a Drupal sprint on 13th February, 10PM onwards, focussed on Drupal 7 Usability. For those who follow the Drupal community, know that a formal D7 usability testing will be conducted at the University of Baltimore, 10 days before Drupalcon DC starts. We hope to help out the Usability team by reviewing and hacking on their patches before the formal testing begins. Also, we will be helping new contributors learn their way around and explain how the Drupal core machinery works :-) After all, even something as awesome as Drupal needs thousands of man-hours of work before it ships!

To participate in the sprint, you need:

• A computer with any CVS client (*nix people have CVS, Windows has TortoiseCVS)
• Some knowledge of PHP and MySQL (more than hello-world ;-)
• An interest in Drupal!
• Willingness to hack and pursue world domination.

We hope the hackathon is a great success and hope you have tons of fun! Do join us if you can!