Insanity Rulz ...

Vaibhab talking on JavaFx 1.0

BOJUG meet was held on the 20th of December 2008 at Divyasree Chambers. Recently JavaFx 1.0 got released and we decided to dedicate this months meet to JavaFx. Vaibhav gave a lovely talk on the features of JavaFx and also pointed out some limitations.

Pizza Magic

Subrato and Vaibhav - Quiz Masters

Abhishek giving away the prizes

After his talk we had some Pizza's which was followed by a small quiz on JavaFx. Winners got key chains and pens.

Fourty three people showed up for the meet. This was probably the largest meet for BOJUG. Was it the Pizza effect or was it JavaFX magic ?

You can download JavaFx SDK from http://www.javafx.com/

Previous BOJUG Meets

August 08 BOJUG Meet
July 08 BOJUG Meet
June 08 BOJUG Meet

Posted by Tirthankar @ 08:02 PM IST [ Comments [4] ]  | 
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The new OpenSolaris TShirt looks cool. I am eagerly waiting to get one

Posted by Tirthankar @ 06:50 PM IST [ Comments [1] ]  | 
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At last OpenSolaris 2008.11 got released officially on the 10th of December. I have been playing with the release candidate build for quite some time on VirtualBox. Finally I installed it on my laptop.

The first things which really impressed me were the new installer screenshots. They looked lively and fresh.  After the installation was over, the wireless and the sound worked flawlessly. I had to install the Marvel Youkon driver myself. The Firefox which came did not come with the flash plugin which I had to install myself. Then I tried downloading packages from the IPS repository. I downloaded OpenOffice 3.0, Netbeans 6.5 and SunStudio Express and SongBird. Now I have a fully functional desktop.

I am yet to try out the new features like Time Slider and some other cool features but you can view the video on the new features of OpenSolaris at http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/screencast_what_s_new_in

Happy exploring OpenSolaris 2008.11

Note: Click on the pictures to enlarge them

Posted by Tirthankar @ 09:35 PM IST [ Comments [1] ]  | 
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Sun Campus Ambassadors celebrated SFD all over India.  Karthik from BVB, Hubli and their OSUM club members have come up with the SFD Video.

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 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.

Posted by Tirthankar @ 08:04 PM IST [ Comments [2] ]  | 
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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

Posted by Tirthankar @ 11:00 PM IST [ Comments [2] ]  | 
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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

Posted by Tirthankar @ 11:52 AM IST [ Comments [1] ]  | 
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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.