My campus in a blog Ahmed Saeed's Blog

Sun announced the benchmarks for its new flash array system.

Key thing is, it out performed mechanical hard drives with all the benifits that come with using solid state drives such as low power consumption, mechanical shocks tollerance and ease of deployment. You can find all the technical details explained way better than I can explain it in this video.

For further information check this here

 I have been hearing about Software Freedom Day from my first day as a Campus Ambassador, and now it's finally approaching. I am currently planning it to be one of the biggest events my University has ever seen. We are planning on having presentations, demos, contests and social events from the 1^st of September to the 15^th. It will be a huge celebration and EVERYONE is invited to join.

We have reached so far 3 students' organization to work on this event Alexandria ACM Chapter, Alexandria University OSUM Club and the Arabic Wikipedia Team. Now we are recruting volunteers to organize the event and help make it as big as it can be.

If you're interested in attending this event please RSVP here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=124455764728 and here http://osum.sun.com/events/software-freedom-day-6

Now we are laying out the detailed plan of the event. SoWait for my updates on the event.

I was invited to be a speaker on the Sun Microsystems Day as a part of the OpenSource week organized by the IEEE branch in Cairo University. So I decided to hold three presentations: the first an Introduction to Sun, OSUM and SAI, the second an Introduction to OpenSolaris and the third Netbeans: The only IDE you'll need.

I headed to cairo early in the morning and I found out that I'll be there early so I stopped by the local office to finish some routine work. Then I took a Taxi to Cairo University to save time (he charged me more than the bus charged me to get from Alexandria to Cairo!!) When I reached the university I liked the way they organized their booth and how they promoted the day. I talked for them for a while about how they organized the open source week and how the other days were.

At 3:30 my presentation started attended by more than a 100 students. The audience was great, interactive, understanding and enjoyable. I had so great talks with them between the presentations and got pretty good questions during the presentations. They all seemed to be excited about SAI and eager to use OpenSolaris. We talked about how NetBeans made life easier and compared it to Eclipse.

After they was finished I got good feedback from the organizers and enjoyed some brief talks with some of the audience. It was really a great day that I enjoyed. You will find below some pictures that were taken during the day.

We have been planning to have a stand to promote OSUM for a while now. So we had a chance to make joined stand between OSUM and Arabic Wikipedia Workshop so we did it. We got two large tables and a space in the hall of the electrical building. I am writing this post on the second day as we hit today the mark of 120 registered student on the stand which makes our OSUM club near to 300 student. So how are we doing it and what exactly are we promoting ??

We are promoting both OSUM (Open Source University Meetup) and SAI (Sun Academic Initiative). We are telling students stopping for the stand about the activities we are making on campus in the OSUM Club and the benefits that they will get if they joined us. Also we are telling them about SAI and the discount they'll get on the certifications if they joined it. During the talk we get to tell them what Sun is and why Solaris is important.

To make the stand more interesting for students we made a list of questions and the students that solve it gets an OpenSolaris package is a reward. That made the stand popular among students as we gave away more than 50 packages and most of those were interested in trying it.

The Arabic Wikipedia part of the stand is promoting Arabic Wikipedia and asking students to help the Arabic Wikipedia reach 100,000 article. It's really an exciting experience. The following are pictures of the stand (I am not in any of them as I am the man behind the camera :D)

So we have an assignment that we have create GUI for simulating simplex method with 2 variables graphically... whatever. We have to write the assignment in C++ and my group choose GTK+ as the library to write the GUI with. And I thought it´s time to put the new environment to the test.

Here you will find the details of how to run and compile GTK+ applications using NetBeans on OpenSolaris. First you´ll need to install GTK+ and you can do that simply using IPS (Image Packaging System) just search for GTK keyword and all the libraries you need will come up. GTK 2.0 is available as part of SUNWgnome-base-libs so you won't need to download it.

Then all you have to do is configure NetBeans to work with it is to add this line

         `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0`

into the command line options of the project (File->Project Properties) and here you are.

Note: I am using SunStudio which you can get also through IPS.

Hello dear readers, it has been a while since I posted my last blog post I moved and had no Internet and then it was back to college and everything was so messy but I guess everything is falling into place now.
So as soon as everything settled I decided to install OpenSolaris on my laptop. Till then I used it only as an image and did not use it that much. I´ll try to explain how to make your OpenSolaris your main OS and start forgetting other OSs.

First I´d like to state my background. I am an Ubuntu user and I loved using it. It was my main environment. I work usually with in 2 environments Ruby and C/C++ and Ubuntu worked perfect for me. So I decided to move to OpenSolaris, Why???

The main thing is to see what all the fuss is all about and to try a new software. When I decided to move I knew I needed to configure everything so fast because I´ll probably need to work with it immidiatly. And I did, I faced a some difficulties and that´s what this post is all about. This post is for users with familiarity with Linux based systems.

First if you already have a Linux destro on you machine you should know how to recover th grub with is an easy process that could be done using the Live CD of that Linux Destro.

Configuring OpenSolaris is pretty easy thanks to the IPS (Image Packaging System). You´ll of course need JDK, GNU Build Tools, NetBeans and OpenOffice. All those are available in the default repository. You can find more information about IPS here.

I had a self extracting package of Netbeans and I needed to install it. I am used to having root access and using the bash console to do such tasks to I needed to be a sudoer. I added my user to the sudoers file. So you can do that as you do it with Ubuntu. But to gain enough access to edit the sudoers file you will need to use su command. The console will ask you to enter your password and then you follow the normal steps as in Ubuntu.

By then I had all the software I needed to develop in C/C++ and build a Ruby1.9.1. But I realized that I never used an mp3 file. So I gave it a try and it didn´t work.

The mp3 players you can get from the IPS or build yourself are all interfaces to the gstreamer library which needs an mp3 decoder plugin to read mp3 files. You can get a propper decoder here. Then you can copy it to the following path /usr/lib/gstreamer directory. You can now stream mp3 files.

Now I think I´ll be able to start feeling like home.

I hope you´ĺl be able to feel the same to.

Last Tuesday I made a presentation called "FOSS, OSUM and SAI: How to be part of the world" for my class mates. It was mainly to introduce them to what we are going to do as an OSUM club and how can they get the best of what we are offering. This presentation was the third of the series of presentations I started. As third year students our technical back ground is quite good so I skipped all the technical details I went through with the other two presentations. I was excited to find a lot of students interested in SAI and being an organizer in OSUM club. The feedback I got from that presentation was much better than the feedback I got from the previous two presentations.

If you are interested in being an organizer please follow the discussion board on the Alexandria University OSUM group. And about the material I presentated you can find it here.

Here are some of the pictures of the presentation taken by Victor (The events organizer).

I wanted to share the structure of the club with anyone who is thinking about starting an on campus club and get what you think of what I have done so far. First when I was assigned the task of starting an on campus club to promote for open source I thought that this club should have a structure and policies that will enables it to live long after I have left my university. So as any organization it should have a board that decides the policies and the targets of the club and each board member should be responsible for a certain task with the help of volunteers called organizers. 

I had a meeting with some of my friends that had previous experience in organizing clubs and events. We suggested some positions and settled to the following:

1. Club Leader:
   Responsible for coordinating all the team of the club. Also he is responsible for organizing the monthly meetings and deciding the strategy of the club along with the CA.

2. Membership's organizer
   Responsible for helping all the students that want to register in the club and make sure that they register in the online Alexandria University  OSUM club online and SAI. There could be more than one membership’s organizer with one leader that reports to the Club Leader on monthly meetings. All the other organizers will report to the organizers’ leader apart from the Club Leader.

3. Event's organizer
   Responsible for organizing the club’s relations with other clubs on campus and the university administration. His responsibility will include arranging shared events with other clubs on campus and hosting speakers from other clubs. Also he will be responsible for reserving halls for presentations and live demos.

4. Club historian
   Responsible for documenting all the events, meetings, goals and news. Documentation should include blog posts and OSUM events posting. The historian should help the CA with the sun blogs posts.

5. On campus public relations organizer
   Responsible for organizing the club’s relations with other clubs on campus and the university administration. His responsibility will include arranging shared events with other clubs on campus and hosting speakers from other clubs. Also he will be responsible for reserving halls for presentations and live demos.

6. Off campus public relations organizer
   Responsible for organizing relationships with local open source communities and clubs. His responsibilities will include organizing hosting speakers to make presentations to the club members.

7. Publicity organizer
   This position was suggested as a temporary position as we needed a person that is responsible only for publicizing for the club.

We agreed that at first we will only have those 7 to run the whole club and then start accepting volunteers as soon as we have more members than we can handle. We also agreed that at any time there must be an organizer for every five members to ease running the club on everyone (everyone of us is a student so we must not forget that).

We also agreed to some general policies like:

• Each board member will be responsible for a number of organizers that will help him with tasks assigned to him.

• All the club organizers and the board members should have a monthly meeting where they discuss the achievements done in the previous month and the board proposes the targets of the following month.

• Each semester a set of long term goals will be set for the club’s team to achieve. All the activities done during that semester should be made to achieve those goals or with consideration of those goals. For example: the target number of new members, the target number of tech demos and the target number of certified members.

• Each month a set of smaller and short term goals will be set to be achieved. For example: subjects to be discussed during this month’s presentations and tech demos, supplies needed from sun and increasing cooperation with certain clubs or communities.

• All registered on campus members should be registered OSUM members online and that should be insured by the organizers by either creating accounts for them or guiding them through the registration online.

I hope that our experience be handy for any of you. And I hope to get your comments about it.

Note: For any Alexandria University Students that wishes to become an organizer please contact me through my e-mail Ahmed.Saeed@Sun.com

Yesterday (Sunday, 14/12/2008) I made my first introductory presentation. It was an introduction to Sun Microsystems, SAI and OSUM. It is one of a series of 4 presentations each targeted to a certain year each with a different background. The presentation was attended by about 50 or more students. I got good feedback.

I collected the feedback using feedback forms and I asked the attendees to fill registration forms. The OSUM club organizers will use the data in the registration forms to register for the attendees and send their data to them along with the material I used during the presentation. The presentation  was about 30 minutes long and 3 OSUM club organizers attended the session to help me with collecting and distributing the forms.

This is some photos that Victor (Events organizer) took during the session.

Hello everyone. I am Ahmed Mohamed Saeed a third year student at the Computer and Systems Engineering department in the faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University and I am the first Sun Campus Ambassador in my University. I am so excited about the new job and I can't wait to start my first events (currently being planned). This blog is where you can know about the details of the events I've conducted and others that I am planning to have. Also you might find a post or two talking about a new technology that I have used or read about.
Part of my main activities is the OSUM club so you will find here all that there is to know about who we are, what we have done and also what we are up to (a look in the behind the scene). So don't forget to give us your feedback and be sure that you'll get our reply as soon as possible.
Wish me luck on my adventure as a Campus Ambassador!