My Experiments with OpenSource Kumar Abhishek's Weblog

Opensolaris is a powerful Operating System and Intel Xeon is no doubt one of the most powerful x86 server platform! Now, in the poweful community of Opensolaris there are some serious work going on towards optimizing this powerful Operating System on powerful Xeon so that we can cut down on Power Consumption.. If too much of "Power" has left you confused then go ahead and watch this video in which (Intel) Dave talks about the on-going efforts of optimizing Opensolaris on Xeon.

He also explains some of the cool internals of relationship between power consumption and operating system. Thanks to Terri for bringing this video to me. Check this video out and find out more on whats happening at Opensolaris.org!

May 5th is going to be such a happening date that you might get dazzled! First and foremost, of course, its because May 5th is Birthday of OpenSolaris!! But then OpenSolaris is coming out on the occasion of the CommunityOne which itself is one of the most important events in the OpenSource Calender! 

There is one place where you can catch up with everything which is going to happen on May 5th. Thanks to Terri Wischmann, who is soon going to write all about what is happening on May 5th and beyond... giving us the plug-point to all the buzz of May 5th. Visit her blog 'The Open Waters' where she will be updating (rather unleashing) everything about May 5th. So don't miss out on all the excitement and make sure you keep yourself updated on the most happening day of this year which would be... no points for guessing.. MAY 5th!

May 5th is the most sought after day in this calender year! And do I need to tell you why is that?? Its Birthday of Opensolaris!! On May 5th, the much awaited Project Indiana will mature and would come out in open as the brand new OPEN SOLARIS!!

Me along with my folks at GLOSS are going to celebrate this in a big way!! We have long plans for this day... Even though we will be having exams going on (needless to say, *exams* are the most dreaded *things* in a student's life ) we have planned to celebrate the Opensolaris B'day in style! The agenda for the day is:

• Put up 5 Laptops with placards which would read "Convert your CD
  into Souvenir"
• Cut a Birthday Cake in name of Opensolaris 
  
• Do a small presentation on new features of Opensolaris
• Have Lunch together
• Do a installation demo
  
• At the end, invite students to come up and give a talk on what they
  feel about future of Opensolaris
• Promise "Opensolaris" that we will work towards "Rearing it To
  become the Best Desktop OS"!
  

Everyone at GLOSS is excited about this! After all.. OpenSolaris is "OUR OWN" Operating System and we want to be nice "Uncle GLOSS" and we want to take good care of the new kid!!! Its all in the family you see

On 6th of March 2008, I addressed the largest crowd I had ever done before!! It was more than 2000 students who turned up for the Sun University Day at SRM University Chennai. K. Nageshwara Rao, who is Site Lead of India Engineering Center (IEC) Bangalore was the chief guest for the event. He was accompanied by Ganesh and senior professors from SRM. Those who don't know, Ganesh Hiregoudar manages the Sun CA program for the APAC region.

 A very informative keynote was given by KNR and I followed with my presentation on Education 3.0 and Immersive Education. Then Anil came up with his brilliant Robot, which he made on top of Sun SPOTs. "Babu Rao" as we call the robot is indeed an example of sheer power which Sun SPOTs can bring to the hands of developers! It was amazing!!

It was a lovely experience sharing my learnings at WWERC 08 with 2000 students! Knowledge has been growing exponentially and we are about to hit the threshold limit of learning posed due to physical restrictions... But then.. earlier in the history when we faced the limitation of "no printed books", Gutenburg did the trick.. in this age.. Immersive techniques like Project Wonderland is going to come for our rescue!!

I'm just out of a panel discussion over the  "Immersive Education" and from what I saw, two things where every evident. 1st, its not late that classrooms will no longer be required to teach and learn and 2nd- learning is going to be whole lot fun!

Things like project wonderland, which had enabled virtual collaboration seamless and boundless, the way we look at student-teacher relationship, it is sure to change. Project Wonderland enables application sharing, voice chat, and many other "out-of-this-world" features in a virtual world setup. Combine them together you will see that we have everything that you would need in order to establish a very effective learning tool in order to execute a practical and effective course on almost anything which can be taught to any other soul!! Just to get a feel of it, you can see the following videos which are the examples of where the project wonderland is heading to.

Explore more is all what I can say.. because the **possibilities** in this **wonderland** is making "unlimited" look a "dwarf" word!!

Things are getting good to great at Worldwide Education and Research Conference 2008! I got a chance to interview Mr. Zack Urlocker, (for those who don't know, Zack is the Executive Vice President - Products, for MySQL) the dynamic leader of MySQL! Earlier in the evening, Zack was on the panel of "Enabling Communities" along with Barry Libert, the famous author of We are Smarter Than Me, and Michael Keller who is the University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources at Stanford University. For everyone in the hall, the session was so informative that I could as well call it an "Eye Opener".

In the interview, Zack told me many things about the business model around open source. Everyone knows that the best business model is that model in which each of its component are in a win-win situation. Zack very well justified how open source is exactly the same kind of model where every one is in a win-win!

 

Personally, I always felt that the way businesses around the globe are migrating towards the collaborative model for production and distribution, and with collaboration tools becoming more and more common amongst the internet users, the day is not far when everything will have to move towards the collaborative model. And after talking to Zack I'm even more convinced that if someone would like to remain close and try to make money the traditional way, then for them might be its a good time to take the message - either "Open Up" or, sorry to say but, "Close Down"!

 Watch the video for more!

Feb is a hectic month with so many works to do!! But then, GLOSS is always good at finding quality time with latest technologies! So on Saturday 16th of FEB, I organized a Lab Session for GLOSS where the agenda was really tight! OpenSolaris-Netbeans-Web technologies with PHP and MySQL!! We had more 5 hours at hand so I thought we can complete everything but then.. People loved Solaris so much that I had to show it to all for more than 2 hours!! Then we came to using netbeans!! Almost everyone here at SASTRA, who had attended my demo on Netbeans last month was asking for a Lab session on netbeans to get an hands on experience! So when netbeans arrived,everyone was very happy!!

With 50 odd students, that too, curious students, conducting a lab session is never easy! But then we all enjoyed the session. Starting from 9:00 AM (On a Saturday its really early!) we all continued to fiddle with the Sun technologies till almost 2:30 PM!! At the end of all, came the time for the GLOSS monthly awards. This time we had two winners. Harish of first year ICT for making the GLOSS logo and Kishore Krishnan for his participating on the GLOSS discussion forum. Kishore was not there to receive his t-shirt, but Harish got his OpenSolaris Coffee mug!

 

But in these five hours, we could do only OpenSolaris and netbeans, that too, partly. Web-technologies, which I had to include on public demand, I had to push to next day! And Yes.. folks were all ready to come on a Sunday!!

So next day, on Sunday 17 Feb, we all assembled in Chit Vihar classroom 302, for a session to discuss further on Open Solaris and Web-technologies . From 9:30 AM to 2:00 PM, I spoke about how Internet works and the underlying technologies. Then we discussed how OpenSolaris came into being and how and where it is used. Everyone seemed to be impressed with OpenSolaris!! At the end of it, I counducted a small quiz. And we had three winners winning the exclusive Sun Pens!

 

 

 

Though it was just a pen which they won (Of course it has a Sun logo on it, and everyone wanted a picture with Sun logo seen clearly in the picture ), but the winners were happy! The reason is simple. They were happy because they won! Winners are always happy and Winning is always a pleasure!

 I wish that members of GLOSS continue to win and keep getting themselves deep into the habit of WINNING!
 

Worldwide Education and Research Conference (WWERC) is here once again! And this time, it couldn't have been bigger. Education needs innovation in order to maintain its relevance with changes in times. These changes in times are brought by rapid innovations in the field of technology. Who will deny that Knowledge is Power and technology today, is working constantly towards making knowledge more pervasive, easily available and accessible to all. Keeping all these factors in mind, it is very important for us to maintain a very tight integration between technology and education.

ERC has been the place to discuss just the same thing since a very long time! This time from 25 Feb to 27 Feb at San Francisco, the best set of thoughts will be brought to light by most renowned names in the field of both education and technology. If you are interested in knowing the names please visit the WWERC Agenda!

See you in San Francisco!