Follow the SUN ... Ajay - The Main Event, The Headliner, The Showstopper (^_^)

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On 09 June 2008, IIITM-K Sunclub and Computer Association, College of Engg. Trivandrum organised the first ever Corona - Sun University Day in Thiruvananthpuram, Kerala. Despite the tight schedule of ongoing University Examinations, the students & lecturers from engg. colleges in trivandrum participated in the workshop. A total of 130 students & 5 lecturers turned up to participate and learn more about Sun's robust technologies. Two special guests were also present in the event. Prof. Parthasarathy, IIITM-K who is an die hard fan of open source softwares and Mr. Ashiq, coordinator of the GNU/Linux User Group Trivandrum.

The event started off with a welcome talk by Prof. Srivathsan, Director IIITMK. He inspired all the participants giving an overview of open source software, open courses and how we all can make an impact in the current education system by group learning. Enhancing the quality of the teaching material with the help of Sun's products & learning by contributing to communities.

Prof. KR Srivathsan inspiring students to learn by contributing to communities

The workshop started off with Mr. Ganesh Ram Nagarajan introducing OpenSolaris - History, Overview, Installation and Features (DTrace, SMF, ZFS) followed by a brief introduction to Virtualization Solutions (Zones, xVM, LDOM, Virtual Box) and leading up to High Availability/Scalability with OHAC. There was a lot of interest from the students on DTrace, Virtualization (Virtual Box in particular), ZFS & HA among all other topics that were introduced to the audience, with that we took a lunch break for 1 hour.

Mr. Ganesh Ram Nagarajan doing an Indian Idol, performing OpenSolaris song

The afternoon session began with a basic introduction to Java and paving way to introduce Netbeans and Sun Studio. Most of the students were from CS/IT and they already studied Java in their curriculum and almost all had learned C, C++, even Mechanical Engg. students had learned (out of interest and for campus recruitment). After having familiarized the students to the various features of Netbeans, Mr. Ganesh presented a small demo of creating a simple "Hello World !" java project using Netbeans & also a Flash presentation on creating Mobile Application using Netbeans which mesmerized the participants. The audience was spell bound to see how we can develop a nice application with 80% of code being auto-generated. That was really cool

After that I presented a demo of Sun SPOT and created curiosity among the audience to know more about the kit. With that we rolled up the day long workshop and gave Solaris Starter Kits & Certificate of Participation to all the participants.

After that lot of students circled Mr. Ganesh and asked lot of queries. One student, called a hard-core fan of Solaris by his classmates, came up with his laptop to install Opensolaris 2008.05 on the spot. Actually he had tried installing SDEV but ended up formatting his drives numerous times. Ganesh sir helped him installing the OS (opensolaris) and after booting into it he couldn't control his smile and thanked Ganesh sir. That was really satisfying

Smiling faces after OpenSolaris Installation

Me, Prof. Partha, Mr. Ganesh and Galib (CET) 

Thanks a lot to Galib and his friends for helping me organise the event.

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Some Advice to other CAs based on my experience

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1. Online Advertising for the Event :

As I said in beginning that University examinations were going on so my effort to go the colleges was almost wasted as I couldn't talk to students and invite them for this event. So I took the way by which the message can be passed on i.e. Internet, that everyone knows. In india orkut.com has been very phenomenal in attracting the young crowd i.e. students. India's share of total orkut traffic is more than 30%. Every 8 out of 10 students are using orkut. So it is without any doubt most used social networking site in India.

It is so popular that students might forget to check mail or group posting, will definitely check his scrapbook (his orkut account scraps), atleast. I capitalized on this and with the help of a firefox plugin for orkut I could send scrap to all members of any community. I could also send scrap to all friends of any randomly chosen profile but that way I'll become spammer, which is not my target. My goal was to invite all engg. students who are studying in colleges of Trivandrum city to the Sun University Day (Corona). This trick worked for me and as student representatives & CS-IT association representatives of different colleges contacted me regarding this event. But due to University Examinations only handful of students could attend the event. My term as Sun CA is ending this month so I had no other choice but to organise the event. I advice fellow CAs to extensively use these social networking sites as we need to connect with students by thinking like them, which seems interesting to them.

Here I'm not proving the details of how I scrapped to all community members of any community as I don't know whether this is called spamming or advertising in Sun's policies. Please somebody clear this doubt. If its not spamming than I'll share that thing.

2. For pushing the use of Opensolaris 2008.05

After being working as CA for past 6 months I realized that a normal student with less Unix/Linux proficiency will try to avoid solaris as he/she don't want to mess-up with the existing installed OS and think he may loose his precious data. So during the workshop when Mr. Ganesh was explaining the Installation procedure of Opensolaris, we showed the audience that they can install Opensolaris on virtual machine using Virtual Box. Showed everyone that installing OpenSolaris virtually will be the safest way to try it. At that moment all were listening very carefully and we understood that we've hit the nail right on head