Random Thoughts !!!: Its a all random !

The presentation started off with a welcome talk by Prof. Srivathsan, Director IIITMK. He gave a very inspiring talk on various dimensions of how Open Source could help improving the current academic conditions in India. There were about 120 students. Everyone was mostly new to Solaris rather the Unix world itself. Most of them were familiar with C & C++ and a few of them who were familiar with Java.

The morning session started off with my presentation on 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 them, The session lasted for about 3 hours, with that we took a break for 1 hour for lunch.

The afternoon session was shortened to just 1:30 mins due a parallel session (PPT from some company visting the campus for placements). I started of with basic introduction to Java and then building on that to provide an introduction to Netbeans and Sun Studio. After having familiarized the students to the various features of Netbeans, I presented a small demo of creating a simple "Hello World !" java project using Netbeans & also a Flash presentation (downloaded from netbeans.org) on creating Mobile Application using Netbeans. Then CA from IIITMK, Ajay Kumar took over the stage for presenting a cool demo of Sun SPOT. I must admit it was very cool to see those tiny devices doing wonders :)   There were a lot of buzz around the students seeing the colourful LEDs of the Sun SPOT devices glittering and with that presentation we wrapped up the day long workshop on Sun Technologies !!

Just to give an idea of how well the presentation went .. I actually had one of the students coming with his laptop to install OpenSolaris :) He had faced a lot of problems with the installation after repeated futile attempts earlier !!! He was very happy at the end that he had a fully functional working Solaris running on his laptop :) !!!

After the presentation I had an opportunity to have a discussion with Prof. Srivathsan, where he spoke about the various Academic initiatives that he is trying to push to the HRD Ministry and how Sun & its technology could help that cause.

Overall a very memorable experience at the God`s Own Country !!!