A geek's geek-log My not-so-secret diary

After long last, I sit down to put up a post on the Software Freedom Week celebrations we at MOSUM conducted in our institute. The plans were made, the weapons sharpened and we were all set to make this a successful event. The main focus of SFW in our institute was to reach out to the first and second years students which I think I succeeded in doing. Starting from the 16^th of September,2008, we conducted one session per day on FOSS, GNU/Linux, OpenSolaris and finally, on Network and System Administration. At the end of each session, we conducted a quiz based on the discussion and we gave away headphones as daily prizes and 2 GB USB sticks to the grand winners. Day 5 was a lab session where we conducted a Debian GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris 2008.05 install fest which was finally followed by a Netbeans hands on session. Luckily, the goodies from Sun arrived on an hour before our lab session was to begin. I also gave talks on FOSS in Subodh Public School and MGD Girls Higher Secondary School where I was surprised to find attendances of 200+ on each occasion!

The highly awaited day 6 went a little more smoothly than was expected. We had decided to go over to BITS-Pilani with whom we were to collaborate to conduct the Rajasthan Wide Software Freedom Day celebrations. 54 of us left on a fine Sunday morning in a Volvo bus and we stopped for breakfast at a store named Rawat which is famous for it's onion kachoris (a must have if you come to Jaipur) and made quick work of the 60 pieces we'd ordered in advance. The rest of the journey was fun filled and as we all pushed our vocal chords to their limits with our singing (read braying, considering our banshee like singing capabilities).

We reached an hour before schedule, to Saurabh's (CA, BITS-Pilani) surprise. We took a stroll through their brilliant campus and into the place they called SAC (Student Activities Center). The BITS people have acronyms for every damn thing and it takes quite a while to get used to having a conversation with them about their institute. Their hospitality was par excellence as we were all lead to the SAC cafeteria where we relaxed, freshened up and later on, dug into some amazing food. I myself went medieval on the rotis.

Saurabh then introduced me to Nandan Kumar, a Sun Cluster Engineer and a former BITSian who had come all the way from Bangalore to give a talk. We met again at 3 o'clock at one helluva lecture hall where we setup Nandan's laptop for the presentations. Once the crowd poured in, we decided to kick off the show. Nandan gave an insight to open source and Sun's involvement in the same. He also gave an overview of all of Sun's open source technologies. Next, I talked about OHAC and explained the basic concepts behind high availability clustering. Nandan then gave a demo on the same, by failing Apache over three zones. Saurabh and I then conducted a quiz where we handed out some CDs to the quicker (and sharper) ones among the lot .

Then came the programming/debugging contest where my team (and Ankit's team who were next to us :P) had a lot of fun trying to crack the four problems that were given to us. Apart from all the fun I had, I was also reminded of how bad I am at this . Anyways, once that was done, we then spent some time lazing around in the SAC and waited for dinner and we were treated with some pretty neat dishes again. The shahi paneer was simply superb. Yet again, I put up a good demonstration of my hogging skills. Darn I'm cheap, but food is food right?

We left BITS at 10 PM on the dot and I took some feedback from my fellow students on the week as a whole. And I must say, it felt really great to hear all that positive feedback . We reached Jaipur at 1:30 in the morning after another interesting trip where all the 2^nd years were actually working on an assignment they had to submit at 8 in the morning! Anyways, I fell asleep as soon as I hit my bed. I dreamt about Dota that night.