Monday Mar 24, 2008
A
logo/caption contest was organized as part of the open source mela.
Nivedita Kamat ran the contest on behalf of IEC. A good number of
entries were received, but it was extremely difficult to finalize the
best entry. There were a lot of responses a day before the contest close date. The name of the winner along with the list of captions will
be published soon. Watch this space for updates.
The contest announcement:
It's the perfect time for you to get those gray cells working! The IEC Open Source Mela 2008 is looking for it's very own Brand Guru!!! We bring to you the Caption and Logo competition! All you need to do is envisage a logo OR design a caption for the IEC Open Source Mela 2008. What we expect is not the run of the mill ideas but beyond the obvious and the known. So send in your ideas for the Caption and Logo competition and the best ones will be recognized and rewarded.
Monday Mar 24, 2008
Meet IEC open source mela gaming guru Gopal + organizers Swathi Devulapalli & Tirthankar Das. Hear what they have to say about the mela and it's objectives:
- The mela is organized to bring in awareness on open source, and encourage IEC engineers to contribute to open source products
- Highlight the open source projects from IEC
- About 40 talks and 10 demos are planned over the next two days (3/25 and 3/26)
- A lot of fun contests and games are part of the mela too
Monday Mar 24, 2008
The open source mela is not just about talks, presentations, and demos. It's about fun and games too. Imagine playing the multi-player Quake 3 game with four other colleagues from your OpenSolaris desktop. Isn't it fun? Sun engineer Gopalakrishnan Sankaran has been working hard to set up this game on OpenSolaris for the IEC open source mela.
What is Quake 3 all about? As per wikipedia: "As with most multiplayer first-person shooters, the aim of Q3A is to move throughout the arena fragging (killing) enemy players and scoring points based on the objective of the game mode. When a player's health points reach zero, the avatar of that player is fragged; soon after the player can then respawn and continue playing with health points restored, but without any weapons or power-ups previously gathered. The game ends when a player or team reaches a specified score, or when the time limit has been reached." Click here for more information about Quake 3 and how to play the game.
Thursday Mar 20, 2008
Meet Tirthankar Das, the man behind IEC Open Source Mela. He sports an extra dash of color on the eve of Holi. Of course, he looks cool but organizing an event of this magnitude calls for a lot of talent and patience. The main objective of the mela is to generate awareness, participation, and contribution from the IEC community on open source technologies. The whole event is coordinated by the open source initiative team comprising: Suvendu Ray, Joe George, Kesari Mandyam, Swathi Devulapalli, Srinivasan Rengarajan, Veena Damodaran, Bhuvaneswari Panchapakesan, and KNR.
Thursday Mar 20, 2008
Meet the IEC HR team.
Did you think only software groups are gearing up for the open source mela? Well, HR is getting ready for the mela too. But why? In fact, HR is setting up stalls to talk to IEC engineers about hiring, internal job transfers, job statisfaction and so many other things that are closely related to working at Sun. It is an effort from HR to reach out to the ever busy techies. Only an event that is as powerful as the open source mela can bring the IEC geeks from their desks to the mela venue. So, HR is cashing in on the opportunity to reach out to the employees.
Thursday Mar 20, 2008
An interesting aspect to coding that most of us don't think of. Can there be a legal aspect for coding? Certainly yes, says SaiSatish Vedam. Here is more on the topic, in his own words:
It
is now imperative for us software engineers to understand that
the lines between the tech code we write and the "legal code"
(Intellectual Property) is blurred. Architectures created by the code
we write embeds certain fundamental principles and values.
Increasingly intrusive changes in the "legal code" and vice-versa
are undermining these fundamental principles and changing the
basic characteristic of architectures. The talk aims to provide
this understanding using some real life stories. The talk attempts to
make a case for open source software being a key factor in a
present world where "code is law".
Thursday Mar 20, 2008
The IEC open source committee is organizing a series of contests for Sun's enthusiastic geeks. The banners and e-mails inviting contest entries are already out. IEC engineers are busy trying their hands at these contests. The passion for open source in IEC needs to be seen to be believed.
The following contests are being organized:
- Mad-ads
- Open source poster/logo/caption
- Acrostic puzzle
- Open source gaming
At the end of the day, contests are an opportunity to learn and get better at things. To quote Geoffrey Gaberino:
"The real contest is always between what you've done and what you're capable of doing. You measure yourself against yourself and nobody else.”
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