Sun Campus Ambassador Asim Munawar's Blog

I organized a SunSPOT in my university on 26th of June 2009 (Friday). It was quite successful and more than 20 students from the university attended the seminar. The SunSPOT presentations on Campus Ambassador's website helped me a lot. They provided me a base for the demos and the contents of the seminar.

 I started to plan this seminar almost one month ago. The things i was most concerned about were the demos. Another important thing was to clearly explain and demostrate the ease of use and the advantage of using SunSPOT as compared to other alternatives. For this I downloaded some demos from the internet before hand and understood the code very well. Moreover, i spent a lot of time with SunSPOT Manager and NetBeans IDE. 

Many students came to me and also sent me emails after the seminar. Some of them want to use SunSPOT in their reserach and serious applications while other showed their interest in using SunSPOT to control the toys and make toys that can do what you want them to do and not what they are programmed to do by default.

I would like to thank everyone who helped me with the seminar especially Yuiko Matsuzuka, Hajime Akashi from Sun Tokyo Office. I would also like to thank Cristian Davi and Azhar Khan for helping me with the preperations and cleaning of the room. I have attached some pictures of the seminar.

Yesterday on April 24th 2009, I organized a seminar on "Java Technologies" at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. The event was a big success and almost 50 students of different nationalities attended the seminar. This was the second Sun seminar at Hokkaido University linked to the Sun campus ambassador program.We distribute questionnaires during every seminar. In the last seminar many students shown interest in Java technologies and uses of Java in their field of research. Therefore, I decided to have this seminar on Java technologies and other uses of Java in different areas.

 Although everything went on fine yesterday but organizing of the seminar was not an easy task. I started almost 20 days ago with printing and distributing the pamphlets/posters in the university. I put the poster on more than 50 notice boards of our university. For the presentation I found a lot of interesting material on the sun campus ambassador's website. I would like to thank the authors of those presentations. Also many people from Sun office Tokyo also helped me with organizing the seminar. I would like to say special thanks to Akimoto san, Yamaguchi san, Akashi san and Matsuzuka san for their invaluable help and support.

We started the reception at 1645. We gave a set of SAI pamphlet, questionnaires, and Duke key chains to each participant. In order to make the things easier for the participants we had the questionnaires in both English and Japanese languages. The seminar started at 1705. I gave almost 1 hour presentation on Java. The main agenda of the presentation was the history of Java, some basics, difference of Java from other programming languages, Java virtual machine, different flavors of Java, uses of Java and most important of all "why use Java". The presentation contained numerous examples to show the ease of use and the abstraction provided by Java API's. After that I requested Yuiko Matsuzuka san (Japan CA coordinator) to introduce SAI and OSUM community. The presentation finished at around 1820. We still had some time before the delivery of the Pizzas. So we took the oppertunity to introduce the topic of our next seminar SunSPOT. I had SunSPOT kit with the AirText demo. I introduced SunSPOT briefly and showed the demo. Many students were interested in SunSPOT after looking at the simple demo. I also gave a preliminary date for next seminar (12th of June). After this Yamaguchi san (Sun Employee) showed another demo using SunSPOT on a remote control car. It was very fascinating for the students related to robotics and mechatronics. They had never heard about people using Java for this kind of stuff. So I would say that SunSPOT was a big hit and I really hope that many people will attend our next seminar.

We had different kinds of giveaways for all the participants. Some of the giveaways were meant for the participants who ask questions or answers any question during the presentation. We had T-shirts and bags for all the participants who filled and returned the questionnaire. After than the Pizza arrived at around 18:30. It was just great and students simply loved it. They stayed in the room for a long time discussing different Java related things with me and other Sun employees that we had for the seminar. Finally at 20:00 we were free and we left the room after arranging everything.

From the questionnaires we distributed before the seminar, I can safely say that more than 95% of the students were satisfied with the seminar. I went through all the comments and suggestions by the participants and I will try my level best to improve the seminars in future. Many students are interested to learn more about Java and Sun technologies. We got email addresses of almost all the students and we will send them invitation to join the univesities OSUM community. We are looking forward to increase to OSUM community to at least 100 by the end of June 2009.

I would like to thanks everyone once again who helped me with this seminar either directly or indirectly. Given below are some memories from the seminar.

After last months seminar on "Open Source Technologies" many students from University showed interest in FOSS. Especially, Virtual Box was new for many people. When i explained that you can install OpenSolaris parallel to your other OS they were very excited. 1 week after the seminar two students contacted me. One was using a separate PCs for linux and windows. Another student bought a NetBook with intel Celeron processor and 4GB of harddisk space. His problem was that even if you connect a USB disk to increase the storage, still many softwares require some space in the C: drive. This makes it difficult to install too many things on a 4GB harddisk. I am sure that there must be some better solution to handle this problem but I recommended him using Virtual Machine.

For the first case we installed the SunVirtual box on the PC running Windows Vista. and installed OpenSolaris as the guest OS. This PC was a quad core therefore the performace we got in OpenSolaris was amazing. However, the student wanted to assign specific processor cores to the guest and host OS. I was not able to do that and after asking the same question on Sun Ambassadors mailing list i realized that it is not doable in this version of Sun virtual box. I don't know how important this feature is but i think many people would like to use it atleast for their own satisfaction. Other competitors of VirtualBox provide this feature through simple settings.

For the second case we had to install WinXP guest OS over WinXP host OS. but the processor was intel celeron and memory was only 512 MB. Naturally the installation was very very slow. However things were a lot better after increasing the RAM to 2 GB.

I personally virtualization as the future of computing world. Benifits of virtualization have already started to appear in the areas like cloud computing.

I organized a seminar on "Open Source Technologies" at my university i.e. Hokkaido University (north of Japan). It was held on 30th of January 2009 (Friday) 5-7 PM at Clark Kaikan of Hokkaido University. It was in someways one of the most challenging things I have ever done. The planning end of December. First task was to select a topic. As this was the first seminar organized under "Campus Ambassador Program", therefore I wanted to make it interesting for a wide range of audience. So I selected just an introduction to Sun and other open source technologies. As an example of an open source software I selected OpenSolaris. I also introduced OSUM and SAI.

Next step was to do the publicity. For that I made posters in Japanese and English and pasted them in as many notice boards around the university as possible. Moreover, I uploaded them on as many university websites as possible. Also uploaded the demo information on OSUM group page as an event. Moreover, I requested the professor to introduce this event at the end of their lectures. Also I uploaded the posters to my facebook account and invited some of my friends to join the seminar. Moreover, I also distributed the posters to different labs around the universities. Hence, I tried every possible way to advertise with a hope of gathering as many people as I could.

 Next task was to make the presentation. Thanks to the excellent resources available on Sun CA web site's demo section. I decided the agenda of the presentation as follows:

• Introducing Sun

• Introduction to OpenSolaris

• Free online training – SAI

• OpenSource SNS – OSUM

• Q & A

• Pizza Party!!

Invaluable resources on Sun CA website helped me to create the presentation. Selecting the language of the presentation was another challenge. As most of the material is available in English language therefore, I planned to make the main presentation in English language. But as I was expecting Japanese students to attend the seminar therefore I translated all my presentation into Japanese language. I printed this Japanese presentation and distributed to during the seminar to all the people who were more comfortable with Japanese. I planned to make my lecture bilingual also but that was not possible in the available time. Therefore, it became almost like a lecture in English language.

Matsuzuka San, and Akashi San helped me to order different giveaways for the participants. All the CAs and Sun employees were also very helpful and supportive for everything I asked for.

Fortunately two Sun employees (Ray Akimoto san, Hajime Akashi san) also came to support me during the event. Finally, after almost 3 weeks of preparations the day came. I went there 1 hour before the seminar. Organized the place with Akimoto san, Akashi san and one of my friend. The lecture started at its time and I was amazed to see more than 35 students attending the seminar. Out of them more than 10 were Japanese and others were from all different nationalities of the world. Before the lecture we gave each person a CD of OpenSolaris, Sun Development Tools and key chains. In the beginning of the seminar I asked Akashi san and Akimoto san to introduce themselves and tell a little about Sun. Then I started the lecture and to my amazement many people were interested in many of the things I talked about. If a participant asks a question or answers some question we gave him/her a T shirt or a backpack. Everything went on very smoothly. Virtual Box seemed to be something in which many people took interest. I was asked many questions by the students and Akashi san helped me to answer some of them. By the end of the seminar most of the give aways were finished and we were only left with a few backpacks and a few t shirts. Then we had a pizza party during which we collected questionnaires from the participants. Some people however, did not submit the questionnaire. To make it easy for the students I made questionnaire in both languages. i.e. Japanese & English.

Lessons Learned:

• I am planning to make the next seminar's lecture bilingual.

• I can give a talk in English while I can request a Japanese student to translate everything in Japanese. However I still need to figure out an easy way to make it bilingual.

• Don't give the giveaways in the start of the lecture. Rather give them at the time of questionnaire submission.

• Find a way to invite more Japanese students to attend the seminar. I don't know why but it is pretty difficult to convince a Japanese student to attend the seminar. In my lab I asked 11 Japanese students to attend the seminar and all of them agreed to come if they can. But on the seminar day none of them was there. That was very disappointing for me. Moreover, I asked students from other labs also. I also distributed posters in the labs but that does not seems to be of much use.

Anyways, it was fun. I learned a lot of new things during this seminar. Even tough making all the arrangements was not a very easy task but with the help of my colleagues and friends I was able to manage everything in a planned way. Given below are some of the memories from the seminar. I hope that the future seminars are better and more useful for the students then this one.

For a brief introduction to Sun Glassfish Technology Click Here. I found this brief introduction to Glassfish. It is brief and to the point.

Cheers !!!!

I was just taking the training of the new features in Java SE 6 Platform at SAI web page. The course number is (WJO-1001). Its a 5 hour lecture and quite interesting. However, it seems to have some problem with the audio. This audio problem really makes some parts difficult to understand especially for non native English speakers :( . Would love to take this lecture again with better audio quality.

I visited Tokyo on 4^th and 5^th of December to attend Sun University Day 2008 and a mini training session organized by Sun Japan for orientation of two newly hired CAs (Rio Kokubu and myself). University Day was interesting and it provided me an opportunity to meet and talk with James Gosling. I really enjoyed his way of talking and his vision about the future of programming languages and computers. Anyways, what I want to talk about is not the University Day but the mini training session held on 5^th of December from 10AM-5PM. The schedule of mini training included:

1. Introduction to SunSPOT (By: Yamaguchi San)
2. Sun Academic Initiative (SAI) (By: Matsui San)
3. OpenSolaris (By: Funasaki San)
4. CA Orientation (By: Ganesh & Yuiko San)
5. Discussion about OSUM (By: Matsuzuka San)

Even though all the sessions were equally interesting, I will discuss only two: (1) CA Orientation by Ganesh Hiredoudar and Yuiko Matsuzuka, and (2) SunSPOT introduction by Yamaguchi San.

1). CA Orientation:

Before this session I was quite confused about the exact responsibilities of CAs. However, this well organized training session helped me to understand the role of a CA and it also helped me to streamline a lot of information I read about CAs over the internet. Ganesh joined us using Conference Call. His presentation was very helpful in giving me confidence as a CA to fulfill my responsibilities. Below I have listed some of the important points he mentioned during this session.

1. CAs are not meant for marketing Sun products. That is responsibility of Sun sales department.
2. Job of a CA is to meet students from all faculties (not only computer and engineering faculty) and show them how they can expand their horizon by using technologies supported by Sun. Especially the open source technologies including, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenOffice, MySQL, Glassfish and of course Java.
3. Learn the new technologies yourself.
4. Try to increase the number of students in your respective OSUM community.
5. Make/Organize different kinds of Demos in your campus.
6. All the resources are available so the CAs doesn’t need to create any slides for the demos. Moreover, CAs can offer giveaways and even food during the Demos.
7. CA should be the catalyst for the development of a global community of student developers that creates excitement and preference for Sun’s Open Source Technologies.
8. BLOG!!!. Blog about anything you are doing or you want to share. Don’t be afraid or shy of the mistakes that you may make in writing your blog.
9. It is good to write a Self introduction blog and mail the link of your blog to everyone by email to all ambassadors.
10. Don't worry if you think your question is too trivial or may be even wrong. Just ask it to ambassador’s technical team of your area.
11. Write monthly reports using CART (http://www.ambassadorzone.com). Don’t leave your reports for the end of the month. Keep updating the report after every task  you finish. Reports at due at the end of each month. Don't be late.
12. Keep active on the CA private community (http://www.sunambassador.com). This is a private place for CAs so share the information that they want to make accessible to CAs only.
13. Read CA handbook (twice). CA handbook can be found in “Resources for CAs” section in CA private community website.
14. Finish training sessions designed for CAs. No need to finish everything in 1 week or 1 month. Best way is to learn one technology at a time and then make a demo about it.  Then move on to the next lessons about a different technology. There a live training sessions, if you are not able to attend due to time zone difference or any other reason you can always watch the recording.
15. Have a look at Sun Student Developer Portfolio “http://developers.sun.com/student”. It has a lot of resources for CAs and students, including Free practice exams.
16. Getting Sun Certification is free for CAs. So add this in your target. Also tell other students that they can avail discounts for getting Sun Certifications.

I liked Ganesh’s point of view that Information age is gone. Means that there is a lot of easily accessible information on almost any topic in today’s world. Now is the participation age. That is participate in different projects and observer the technology by yourself. And what would be a better way then joining an open source project of your choice. I would like to thank Ganesh and Yuiko for wonderful orientation.

2). SunSPOT’s introductory session:

I had never heard about SunSPOT before becoming a Sun CA. Fortunately, SunSPOT demo was included in the mini training session for CAs.  I also took the SunSPOT introductory lecture by Ashan during the Sun University Day. Not only was I amazed by the capabilities of SunSPOT but I realized that this is exactly what I wanted from a long time. I remember the time when I was undergraduate student at NUST Pakistan and me & my friends planned to make a robot car as a semester project. We searched a lot for a product that has microprocessor, radio transmission and a gyro in it. Unfortunately, we were not able to find one and we had no other option but to buy everything separately and interface them. That took a lot of time. and effort. I wish i had a SunSPOT at that time :). SunSPOT is still not available in many countries including Pakistan but I hope it will be available in all the countries very soon.

Anyways, SunSPOT is not only about the things I discussed above. It is device that has different types of built in sensors and it can be interfaced to any kind of analog or digital sensors. Moreover it can also be interfaced with different output devices. What I loved about SunSPOT is that it has JavaVM on it. This means that it can run Java byte code directly. Moreover, it does not need any processor programmer module to program it. Just connect it to USB and load your code, too simple haan. It gives a chance to people without any computer's background to do what they always wanted to do.

Yamaguchi san’s tutorial on programming SunSPOT and using the SunSPOT manager tool was also interesting and very informative. It gave me a kick start on the tools available for SunSPOT. It might have taken me a weak for learning the tools that Yamaguchi san explained in a very short time.

 In the end I would like to thank Sun Japan for giving me an opportunity to attend Sun Univ Day and  training session.

My name is Asim Munawar and I am Campus Ambassador of Hokkaodi University, Sapporo, Japan. I joined Sun CA program in November 2008 and I have already started to enjoy it.

I am a 1st year student of PhD. Before this I did my undergraduate from National University of Science & Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. After that I worked in a research based company called Center for Advaned Research in Engineering (C@RE) for almost two years. Then I came to Japan in April 2005, and learned Japanese  for around 1 year. After that I enetered Masters in Hokkaido University.

 Research areas of my research include Evolutionary Algorithms, Grid Computing, and Distributed/Parallel computing. My hobbies are cooking, eating, sleeping, and travel. I am really looking forward to my time with Sun.