Code For Freedom 2008 has been launched. Its a great opportunity for students in India to participate in this Open Source programming competition and win recognition and great prizes. For more details check out www.codeforfreedom.in
Last years (CFF 2007) winners were http://in.sun.com/communities/univ/codeforfreedom/2007/winners.html
Some of the SFD celebrations happening in Bangalore are
RNSIT
Software freedom day celebrations at RNSIT on 20th September 2008
Agenda:
9:00-9:45am :Introduction to Open Source --- Vittal (7th Sem CSE,SUN CA, RNSIT)
9:45-10:30am :Open Solaris Installation Fest ---- Nitin Rao (7th Sem ISE,RNSIT)
10:30-10:40am :Everyone present introduce themselves
10:40-11:00am :Tea/Coffee Break
11:00-11:30am :Introduction to Open Solaris --- Sham Pavman (SUN CA, JSSATE)
11:30am-12:30pm : DTrace Introduction with Hands on Experience of DTrace --- Sham Pavman (SUN CA, JSSATE)
12:30pm-1:00pm : Introduction to NetBeans --- Vittal or Rohit K.V.(7th Sem CSE, RNSIT)
1:00pm-1:40pm : Lunch
1:40pm-2:30pm : Hands on Session on Mobility --- Rohit K.V.(7th Sem, CSE, RNSIT)
2:30pm-3:00pm : Compiz Fusion demo --- Nitin Rao
SUN SPOT Demo --- Sham Pavman
3:00pm-4:30pm : Virtual Internet --- Sattvik Chakravarty (7th Sem ISE, RNSIT)
4:45pm : End of event.
PESIT
Software freedom day celebrations at PESIT on 18th, 19th and 20th September 2008
The celebrations are carried out on three consecutive evenings.
18th evening - Talk on open source. Tomorrow I'm conducting a
19th evening - Netbeans plugin development ( Hands-on session )
20th evening - Brief talk on different open source technologies and Fun events
MSRIT
Software freedom day celebrations at MSRIT on 25th and 26th September 2008
Agenda:
The celebrations are carried out on two consecutive evenings.
25-09-2008
3.30PM - 4.00PM : Introduction to OpenSource
4.00PM - 4.30PM : OpenSolaris Installation Demo.
4.30PM - 5.00PM : Insight on OpenSolaris technologies.
5.00PM - 6.00PM : DTRACE explained.
26-09-2008
3.30PM - 4.00PM : Introduction to NetBeans IDE.
4.00PM - 5.00PM : NetBeans-Mobility pack.
5.00PM - 5.30PM : Classroom usage of NetBeans.
5.30PM - 6.00PM : Discussion on the applications that can be developed on OpenSource and it's Future!
If you are aware of more SFD celebrations, feel free to drop a comment.
Student Technology Camp at IEC
Student Technology Camp was held at our office (IEC) on the 29th of August. School children above the age of 10 were invited to attend talks on Sun technologies.
Raju Macharla giving the introductory talk
The participants
About 75 odd school students had turned up, some were children of sun employees. Raju Macharla gave the opening talk to the kids telling them about Open Source and Sun.
Abhishek then gave the technical talk about various Sun Technologies like Sun SPOT, NetBeans, Java, VirtualBox etc.
The Sun SPOT demo was a super hit.
You can see the complete set of pictures here.
The OHAC community is more than a year old and we still do not have a logo. There are some advantages of not having one. Well you can put almost anything. The freedom to choose the presentation background I guess is the most appealing to me. I have mostly used the OpenSolaris.org presentation slide template made by Chandan I use the Orange and Blue colours used on the OpenSolaris website for Open HA Cluster. Its short, sweet and simple and can be easily inserted in different types of presentations and other material. Others in OHAC community members use other colors to spell Open HA Cluster. All the diversity is fun.
Marcelo proposed in the OHAC community about a logo and below are some of the logos created by Piotr.
I liked number 3, 4 and 6. But I feel that these logos should be used for T Shirts. A more appropriate logo for the community would be something real small with a little picture. The Aquarium blog hosts a number of logos. Its a good place to get some ideas on what could be the OHAC community logo.
You can read about the logo discussion here.
Marcelo's blog on OHAC logo is here.
If you come across more OHAC related logos, please feel free to paste the link as a comment on this blog.
Last Saturday was the first BOJUG meet at Thoughtworks Bangalore. Me and Amit went together. This was the first time that both of us would attend outside Chambers. As usual I was the photographer 
Vaibhav talking on JavaFX preview SDK
Satish talked about Beans Binding and validation
This meet was more than three and a half hours, but it was real worth.
Vaibhav gave a talk on JavaFX preview SDK. It was a real cool
presentation. Satish talked about Beans Binding and Validation. This
went right over my head as my Java knowledge is very very limited, I am
almost an odd one out there Sriram talked about Tomcat internals.
This was interesting as I was planning to fiddle around with Tomcat.
BOJUG Gang
Finally, I took the group pictures. Many of the attendees are not in the picture. They had already left. Three and a half hours is kind of tiresome with a hungry stomach.
Previous BOJUG Meets
July 08 BOJUG Meet
June 08 BOJUG Meet
I did my first code review in the OPEN. You can read its here. Hopefully, more and more cluster engineers will take this path.
The first batch of Sun India CA induction program for 2008 was held last week at MSRIT, Bangalore. This was just after the Bangalore bomb blasts but thankfully all the CA's and organizers turned up. I had gone there as the unofficial photographer, interacting with the CA's and organizers.
Sun India Campus Ambassadors
The Organizer
Amit, Ganesh, Anil, Prabhit, Gary, Abhishek, Rajesh, Vijaya, Angad, Ankit
Kumar Abhishek, did a great job of giving a impromptu talk on OHAC and Lalith from NIT Jaipur gave a 2 minute presentation describing OHAC.
You can see the photographs taken by me here
A few days back, I got invited to join the Sun Campus Ambassadors social networking site. The entry is by invitation only and restricted to Sun CA's and employees (mostly involved with the University Program or the CA program).
After signing up, I created a group for OHAC and am happily surprised to see 10 people joining the group and its not 24 hours yet. Hopefully more CA's will sign up and learn about clustering and high availability and work on OHAC projects.
The OHAC group is at http://www.sunambassadors.com/group/haclusters
Yesterday Bangalore was rocked by a number of bomb blasts. Today we had a BOJUG meet. I was not even sure how many people would turn up but thankfully about 10 people were there. I was happy to see the brave souls who did not let yesterdays violent incident affect their lives.
Sriram gave a talk on "Continuous Integration - What you need to know before implementing it". It was a very interesting talk on software development and how a little bit of discipline could help in producing bug free software. A lot of the stuff is already known, but not followed. I hope one day it is followed in my team. Hopefully we will then stop having those inadvertent build failures and regressions.
And now the surprise. I also gave a talk on Solaris features. Since Sriram was late, I was filling in. I gave a talk on Solaris history and features and told people how many of the server grade features are becoming necessary for the desktops. One day I will give a more Java related talk here. Lets see how it goes.
Many of you always wanted to see me in a BOJUG or BOSUG group picture. You can see me above. Anil took the picture above.
And heres the group picture taken by me which has Anil.
As I write this blog, news is floating in of serial blasts in Ahmedabad. I really do not understand who is gaining from all this but the poor and innocent people are the ones who are suffering.
You can read about the June BOJUG meet here.
The last BOSUG meet was debugging and observability features of OpenSolaris excluding DTrace. Moinak and Sanjeev spoke about mdb, ptools, truss. What amazed me was that most people were hearing these for the first time.
Angad talking about the new Belenix website
The other topic was the new belenix website by Angad. He has done a phenomenal work. Hats off.
Previous BOSUG Meets
http://blogs.sun.com/tirthankar/entry/sunay_tripathi_in_bosug
http://blogs.sun.com/tirthankar/entry/deirdre_talks_in_bosug
Bangalore Open Java User's Group meeting was held on the 27th of June in Divyasree Chambers. This was my first BOJUG meeting. Now you must be surprised what a Open Solaris guy is doing in BOJUG. Well it doesn't hurt to know about new things and make new friends.
The BOJUG Gang
At the BOJUG meet, Rohan gave a talk title From Journeyman to Master. The presentation described attributes of a Rockstar programmer and what one needs to do to become a Rockstar programmer. It was one of the best presentations that I had seen. The other Java related presentation went bonkers .... i need to sharpen my Java skills and act a bit more literate next time
You can read Rohan's blog here
For slides, check out Amit's blog here
After about a year of evangelizing OHAC, finally a student has actually installed Cluster Express, the binary distribution of Open HA Cluster (OHAC). Abhilash, a student from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus is one of the first students in India to install Cluster Express. Probably he is the first one from the student community to do so. All students who have started using OHAC, feel free to comment on this blog about your experiences with Cluster Express.
Hear from Abhilash in his own words.
Abhilash
I am a Computer Science and Engineering student at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus. I was first introduced into the exciting world of Open Source by participating in the Sun Code for Freedom Contest. I very well liked the idea and started learning more. It was a very empowering experience.
At the end of the contest I got introduced to High Availability clusters. I took it up. My first step was installing OpenSolaris on my Sony VAIO VGN-CR35G laptop. Initially I did not get the GUI. I posted my queries in BOSUG and I got excellent support. In the process I learned a lot. Then I installed the cluster. I had an older version of the cluster clusterexpress20080213-x86 which I had installed in Solaris snv_76. I found that my system was panicking after configuring a single node cluster. I posted this in the ha-cluster discuss forum. I learned what all to do in case of a panic. I learned how to take the stack trace in case of a panic. I also learned how to configure the dump device, how to boot into kernel debugger mode. I also got to learn what all to do in case we cannot boot into the OS. It is then that I found that the problem was with the version of the cluster that I was using. I immediately downloaded clusterexpress20080522-x86, installed and configured it and I found that I had successfully installed the cluster. In this process I got very good support from the cluster discuss forum especially from Tirthankar sir and Binu sir who were very generous in helping me out.
It really interests me when I get to learn new stuff. I like to organize technical events; I love to conduct technical sessions. I love to work with groups of like minded people. It really brings out the best in me. I am a CBSE national level hockey player and have participated in many Zonal and National level competitions.
Hope you have a great time hacking OHAC.
Read about Abhilash's experience here.
OpenSolaris workshop at NIT Warangal
National Institute of Technology, Warangal conducted a workshop for professors on OpenSolaris as a part of the Technical Education Quality Improvement Program (TEQIP), of Government of India. The workshop was being conducted by Dr. T. Ramesh, Professor and Mr. S. Ravichandra, Senior Lecturer.
National Institute of Technology, Warangal
Inauguration of the workshop by Raju
Participants
This workshop trained 30 faculty members of Operating Systems with OpenSolaris as the OS. The faculty was given a hands on approach to Operating Systems programming and internals.
Open Source Lab in NIT Warangal
Hands on Lab Session
I gave a talk on Introduction to OpenSolaris and how the faculty could make their course more interesting by making the students see the actual Operating System and working on the operating system. I had another hands on lab session where I showed them how to install OpenSolaris. Most of them were doing it for the first time and I was bombarded with a barrage of questions for an hour. Questions were like
- What happens to my old OS
- Which OS should I install first - Windows or OpenSolaris , Linux or OpenSolaris
- Is there a corresponding software on OpenSolaris for ...
- How safe is OpenSolaris
- Do I need a AntiVirus (I literally laughed)
- How do I write programs, where do I get compilers from
It was fun answering the questions and I felt nice that atleast 30 people will be equipped to make the Operating Systems course more interesting to their students.
Last Friday I along with Swathi gave a presentation on OHAC to Sun CA's. Around 10 (out of 13) turned up for the talk. Most of them were getting exposed to a distributed system for the first time. I faced tons of questions and the 1 hour talk lasted for 3 hours. Well this was not the end. Abhishek and Shampavman showed up after office hours and we again talked about clusters for about 1 to 2 hours. Some of them showed interest to do projects for OHAC. Angad suggested developing a new GUI for OHAC. Abhishek wanted to write an agent for Pentaho.
I hope their enthusiasm about OHAC and distributed systems last and they develop some cool features for OHAC.
In last Saturdays BOSUG meet, Sunay Tripathi gave a talk on the upcoming Solaris Networking feature CrossBow and Network Machines. Sunay is the chief architect of the CrossBow project. As usual, I am not going to make this post technical by writing about CrossBow technology is (as you can find it on the net very easily), but I will write about how Sunay came across this name (people who attended the meeting obviously know it )
Sunay talking on CrossBow
Ashwin and Sunay
According to Sunay, the first name that came to his mind was "machine gun". This new technology would be a game changing technology and like a machine gun, decimate the opponents. But Sun Legal team would never allow such a name. So he kept on thinking until he came across the name CrossBow which actually is more apt. In all the wars that have been fought with machine guns, both side used to possess it and hence neither had any advantage. But in case of wars with CrossBow, there were few wars where only one side possessed it and decimated their opponents. This new technology will be available in OpenSolaris. No other OS has it and it will take some time for other operating systems to have such a feature. Hence the OpenSolaris users have a clear advantage over the others.
Read about CrossBow Technology here
Previous Blogs on BOSUG
BOSUG Meet on June 07, 2008
