Shishu Mandir - World Wide Volunteer Week(WWVW)

In my previous blog entry I was talking about how Sun organizes volunteer activities to make the world a better place. This a continuation of that but a different chapter. After the arduous work at Sangam, it was now time to help out children. Rajesh U.S. had organized a one day event to help out the children in need. I volunteered to help out as, it would be one of the greatest helping hand I could ever provide to humanity.

The place Shishu Mandir, located in Bangalore, is a schooling place for orphans and the needy. It is such a great initiative to help out the young kids so that they can lead a better life in their future. We had a lot of things planned to help out the children. We conducted fun events like Musical Chair and Passing the Ball so that the children could have a great time. We had arranged prizes for the winners of each competition.

We also organized a painting competition so that they could express their artistic talent. Each kid was given a drawing sheet, crayons, sketch pens, and other stationary. The volunteers were helping out the children in drawing and coloring. Some of them were absolutely brilliant.

Post-lunch we gathered all the kids in a room. Some of the kids sang songs and were rewarded with sweets. There were children as small as 4-5 years old, who faced the crowd and sang. They did not have that stage fear. If only they could be given a 'real stage' ...

While the kids were singing, dancing and enjoying themselves, we were acting as judges for the painting competition. We gave out three prizes in each category. This made a lot of them seriously happy. Finally, it was time to leave and it was so hard to do that. Though it was just a matter of 5-7 hours, the kids left a lasting impression in my heart. I will never forget this activity in my life.

Finally, I would like to say this. Everyday, we crave for a zillion fancy things that are not actually essential in our daily lives. On the other hand there are a zillion people out there who do not even have the most necessary and basic things to LEAD A LIFE!!!

Shishu Mandir Volunteer Team

More Photos Here and some more below.

http://picasaweb.google.co.in/vittal.sunca/ShishuMandirWWVW

Shishu Mandir
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=103497&id=583231662&l=98177328ab

Shishu Mandir - Musical Chair Game
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=103503&id=583231662&l=6463bc24cf

Shishu Mandir - Painting Competition
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=103508&id=583231662&l=481a6fd7b8

Shishu Mandir - Painting Competition Part 2
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=103513&id=583231662&l=abed6f9bb1


Shishu Mandir - Lunch with the kids
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=103518&id=583231662&l=328dbd32b0


Shishu Mandir - Prize Distribution
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=103522&id=583231662&l=b74bda0a7e

Shishu Mandir - The volunteers
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=103526&id=583231662&l=45b8a9c2be

Posted at 04:13PM Apr 20, 2009 by Vittal P in Sun

Sangam Eco Drive - World Wide Volunteer Week (WWVW)

There is no bigger joy than the joy you get out of helping. Sun Microsystems has this amazing initiative of organising lots of volunteer activities for one whole week. This week, named World Wide Volunteer Week (WWVW) is dedicated for all kinds of voluntary services. Sun Microsystems, IEC Bangalore, has done an amazing job in conducting the voluntary activities.

When I heard about the events, I most certainly wanted to participate in as many as I could. I participated in two full day voluntary events. On April the 18th, 2009, there was an eco-drive voluntary service, aimed at helping out the environment. On this day, about 50 volunteers (me included) made a short trip to a place called Sangam(100 kms from Bangalore), which is a confluence of two rivers. This is a major picnic spot and picnic spots go hand in hand with litter. We planned to clean up this place and educate the locals as well as the tourists, not to litter and maintain a clean and healthy environment. This activity was supported by an organisation namely Clean and Green, again situated in Bangalore.

Upon reaching Sangam, we were shocked to see it in such a sorry state. There were litter thrown around, plastic bottles, paper plates and all sorts of miscellaneous garbage. Armed with gloves, rakes, gunny bags, and the drive to make the world a better place, we went around cleaning and collecting the items strewn on the ground. Me and my friends formed up teams to rid the place of plastic bottles. We picked the bottles for 1 hour and were able to collect 6 gunny bags full of discarded bottles.

Once that was done, we helped the Clean and Green team to install Cement Rings, so that people could use them as dustbins and not litter the place in future. Once the rings were placed at strategic locations, we painted them with blue and green. I thought painting was an easy job, but it was when I actually started painting that I knew, how tough a job it was. Once this was done, we wrote out notices, so that people could start using them in future. But the most important thing that we did was to educate the people over there to stop littering the place and start using the bins that we had installed.

Once I was done working, I had this amazing satisfaction that I HAD CONTRIBUTED for making the world a better place to live in !!!

Sangam Volunteer team with the litter bags collected.

More Photos here.

http://picasaweb.google.co.in/vittal.sunca/SangamWWVW

- Posted at 03:24PM Apr 20, 2009 by Vittal P in Sun

Comments:

140 Kgs of plastic was collected.

Posted by Tirthankar on April 21, 2009 at 05:53 PM IST

Inauguration of the Technical Club, ASTC at BNMIT

Well, here I am writing another blog post. This one is an unique experience. I have never done anything like this before. So, it is a first time for me.

I was asked to be a distinguished guest for the inauguration of the technical club at BNMIT.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a student in BNMIT named Jayanth M.P. He told me that they were inaugurating a technical club in their college and it was going to be a grand one (It definitely was a grand opening). He had asked me if I could be present there for the inauguration and I did agree for it. He also wanted a SUN Employee to be present there to grace the occasion. He requested for an Employee and finally Rajesh U.S., the SUNCA co-ordinator for south India himself agreed to be there.

We were formally greeted by the BNMIT mangement upon reaching their campus. We were made to sit in the board room along with the Principal, the Director, all the Dept HoDs and a couple of other dignitories from other companies. We were served snacks and drinks. It was weird to be in a social environment with all these high profile people (remember, I am still an Under-Grad Student).

We were then taken to the auditorium for the inauguration. Again, it was all completely formal environment which I had never experienced before. We were introduced to the crowd and were given bouquets of appreciation by the institution!!!

Let me come back to the crux of the event. ASTC stands for Advanced Software Technologies Club. I really liked the name. It is kind of unique and also turns out into a cool acronym. The inauguration started of well and there was Rajesh with his presentation talking to the students about the OUSM group and the SAI programs. The students were indeed keen to learn more about this program. It was quite an enlightening talk to most of them present there.

Crowd at BNMIT

I was called mainly to speak about the SUN CA program and its benefits. I wanted to make it a crisp but an appealing talk which I eventually managed to do. My job was to wake the students up, who were in that hall for 2.5 hrs. God! they were a patient crowd. I was in fact quite amazed at how quite and calm they were throughout the inauguration. When I walked onto the stage, I got the flow that I needed to make a good speech. I was there representating all the SUN CA's across the world. I talked to the students about growing a community, being innovative, contributing to the community and a couple of other thoughts which I think each student must and should follow.

Me @ BNMIT

I am completely happy that I got an opportunity to present my views in front of a big crowd in a different campus! Finally, I would like to thank BNMIT for inviting me (a "mere" student) to represent the Campus Ambassador community at such a major event in their institution.

- Posted at 06:20PM Mar 30, 2009 by Vittal P in Sun

Comments:

Must have been a great experience to be a chief guest (and at a very young age too.. :)

Posted by Nischal E Rao on March 31, 2009 at 06:10 PM IST

I was not the chief guest :P
"Just" a distinguished guest :)

Posted by Vittal P on March 31, 2009 at 11:20 PM IST

First Even Semester Technical Activity

Today I finished the first technical seminar for the even semester.

Its was three weeks since the even semester started and I was getting restless. I wanted to start off with the technical activities as early as possible. So, why postpone? I went to the management and got things approved and here I am today happily typing off after the events :)

27th was the day when we made all the announcements. Me with a couple of my friends went to all the classes in the CS and the IS departments and made announcements about the seminar. While were were expecting a very few to actually attend the seminar, we were shocked when there was a huge number of people who thronged in for registrations. Sadly, we had to limit the registrations to 100 because of space constraints.

The event was supposed to start at 9:00am today morning. There were a lot of students who were eager to enter the lab. To actually tell you the truth, the students were waiting to enter even before the scheduled start of the event. We had to send back about 25 of them, as they had not registered. We had absolutely no space to accommodate more students. The lab I can say, was filled to the maximum extent possible.

Lab filled to the limit

The first event was on Web 2.0, the latest trends in web technology and how to make use of them. Sattvik Chakravarthy, who conducted the event did a splendid job. After talking about the trends and how we are using Web 2.0 knowingly or unknowingly, he went on further to give a hands on demo. He made the audience write a small piece of code using javascript to animate a picture. There was one sentence in his presentation which caught my eye."Lets not just use, lets contribute....". What an apt saying!

Sattvik Chakravarthy giving his session

Web 2.0

View more presentations from vittalp88.

Next, we had a session on the Open Source Content Management System (CMS), Joomla!. Conducted by Nitin Rao, this session was aimed at introducing the use of a CMS in building a website. This session was purely hands on. We had installed servers on each of the machines. The students were made to install Joomla! on their own machines. Once they were done with the installation, they were able to access their website on the localhost. He taught them how to write articles, publish them, change themes, add breadcrumbs, add polls and many more things. By the end of the session, the students were able to create their own websites, write articles and also maintain it.

Nitin Rao giving his session

The final session, conducted by me was on Sun SPOTs. This session had all the ingredients to get the crowd, rooting for more. I started off the traditional way by talking about the history of Sun SPOTs using a slide show. Later, I didnt feel the necessity of slides as the device I was holding had everything I wanted to show in it. I showed the Bounce Demo and I could feel the excitement in the audience. I was running under a severe time constraint, but still had time to show magic tricks like through the head, ectoplasmic ball :P . I talked about the different features of the Sun SPOTs, Squawk JVM, Wireless Communication, etc. I showed the Bounce Demo- On Desktop to emphasise the communication between the basestation and the freerange sun spots. Next came the crowd favourite, Airtext Demo. I asked them to read the words which were shown when the Sun SPOTs were moved. There was synchronous chant of "This is a Sun SPOT". Brilliant! On Popular demand, I changed the code in front of them to show the letters RNSIT, an abbreviation of our college.

This is me :) and the coveted Sun SPOTs

Previously, I had made use of the Temperature Sensor demo so as to transmit the current temperature OTA to the basestation and display it on the PC. I wanted to show this last thing and some how managed to squeez it in time. Finally, I realised there was also the slide show running. I skipped to the Q&A part. I was again surprised to see a lot of students actually asking a whole range of questions about the usability of Sun SPOTs, features, etc. I am sure that my session had appealed to them. I could make out a lot of enthusiastic people in the audience. Signed off by giving the links to sunspotworld, a couple of blogs and sunspotworld forums. Finally I gave out the link to the RNSIT OSUM Group. If you have not joined this yet, please do so.

Sun Spot Talk

View more presentations from vittalp88. (tags: sun)

Finally, I would like to thank my friends for helping me out over the course of these three days.

Nitin Rao, Sattvik Chakravarthy and Me.

More pictures over here.

So, there came an end to an hectic yet exciting day. I plan to conduct more seminars through the course of this semester, before I leave the college. Lets hope I will be able to do what I have planned to do.

- Posted at 06:47PM Feb 28, 2009 by Vittal P in Sun

Comments:

very nice..

Posted by nitin on February 28, 2009 at 06:53 PM IST

It was a very good event. Very interesting crowd. Loved the session I gave. Hoping to make more such events happen before we leave. Congrats to You and Nitin for doing a fantastic job.

Posted by Sattvik on February 28, 2009 at 10:48 PM IST

Sun SPOT Hack at Yahoo! Hack Day India

Well, in my previous blog entry I had told you all about how the Yahoo! Hack Day India 2009 event went along. But, I did not specify much about the actual hack which we did. This blog entry is meant for that.

One of the requirements for Yahoo! Hack Day India, was to develop a hack. The choice and the topic was completely in the hands of the teams participating in the event. I came up with this idea of integrating Sun SPOTs in our hack. I had a couple of ideas as to how we actually could use the Sun SPOTs. I conveyed my idea to my team mates and they all liked it.

Once we met on the hack day, we started brain storming as to what actually we should be doing with the Sun SPOTs. After a lot of thinking and even more thinking, it was decided that we would integrate the Sun SPOTs with Facebook. Each time a friend adds a comment, the status message of the Yahoo! Messenger would change corresponding to the comment and the Sun SPOT LEDs would glow indicating the occurrence of some event. To find out what the event actually was, we planned to use the accelerometer in the Sun SPOTs to display message.

We divided the work amongst ourselves. I was to take care of the Sun SPOT interfacing part and everything related to the Sun SPOTs. Phaneendra was ready to do the Facebook part and Nitin was willing to help him out.

I started out by by establishing connections between the basestation and the freerange SPOTs. Once that was established successfully, I made the LEDs on the freerange to glow once it received any packets from the basestation. That too went on very well. By the time I could do this, it was close to midnight. Being a complete novice in Sun SPOT programming, I thought I did a pretty good job at it.

The hack has two front-ends, the Sun SPOT part and the other being the facebook part. To integrate these two we needed to have a commom backend and I suggested we use a file or a database for the interaction. We decided on using files as they are easier to manage, given the short time we had on our hands. Things were going on very well. But at about 1am, we faced a problem in the facebook integration part. It seems that Yahoo! were not accepting any plugins. So we could not upload our plugins. Phaneendra tried all that he could. He enquired a couple of Yahoo! Crew members and also went on to talk to Christian Heilmann about the problem. We got a negative response from everyone saying that we could not go forward this approach.

This was a low point. One part of the project was coming up perfectly but we were stuck in the other part. So, we decided that we would ditch the facebook and try to interface Flickr. Each time a a person comments on your photos, the Sun SPOT LEDs would glow. Again, there was a dead end here. The plugins were extremely difficult to write and there were also other problems. We could not go forward on this approach.

In the meantime, I had successfully established communication between the SPOTs, and the LEDs would glow whenever a file was modified to our needs. But doing this was not much of a satisfication as the other part of the hack was not moving forward.

Finally, we decided that we would do a very simple thing just so that we could complete the hack on time. This time, we thought of getting a notification on the SPOTs, whenever a friend sent a message on the Yahoo! Messenger. Phaneendra and Nitin started writing the plugin for the Yahoo! Messenger. The two of them were successful in achieving this but not without any problems. Phaneendra was using Javascript to write the plugins and we eventually found out that we could not write to a file using Javascript. This was a huge blow for the hack. At this moment, the two front ends were working perfectly, but there was no means to integrate this with each other.

Everyone was at a loss. I thought of many things for fixing this, but none were feasible. I found out that when the save chat history option was checked in the Yahoo! Messenger, there was a file which was getting writtenupon each conversation. I was so excited on learning this, but agian reached a deadend. The file which was getting written was a .DAT file and the contents were all gibberish. Absolute GIBBERISH! I could not read the file and hence was not able to extract anything valuable.

Finally, I had a stroke of brainwave. I could not extract the event, by reading the file directly, but I could do the same thing by looking at the changes in the file size. I stored the file size of the .DAT file before the start of any conversation and again checked it after some time. If there was a change in the file sizes, I could come to a conclusion that there was indeed some conversation which took place. This was a saviour of a discovery. I had to make some changes to the Java program so that it could recognise the change. Once this was done out hack worked beautifully.

But that was not the end of our problems. The deadline for the submission of the hacks was at 12:00 noon. We could get our hack work only at 12:15pm. So this meant that the deadline was up and we could not submit the hack anymore. We went to the organisers and requested them to give us a chance and explained to them out situation. They were kind enough to say that, if there was extra time at the end, they would allow us. Luckily for us, a couple of teams which had registered for the hack submission, withdrew their submissions. We were thrilled.

David Filo (co-founder of Yahoo!), Spohie Major and others were the judges for the competition. Each team had only 90 seconds to present their hacks. We now focussed on time management and how to effectively demo our hack in 90 seconds. After all the drama, it was time for the demo of our hack. The demo was perfect. There were no loopholes and there were no unexpected events to throw us off guard. When I actually showed Sun SPOTs displaying "NEW MESSAGE", the crowd went bonkers and this is the best cheer I have ever received from any crowd.

After the 90 seconds, I gave a short talk about Sun SPOTs to the 300+ crowd. David Filo was one among them. He is the most high profile person I have ever talked to and given a demonstration to. It was such a euphoric moment for me. One that I will never forget!

Click here to have a look at all the hacks that were presented on Yahoo! Hack Day India. The last one is ours. Here is a screenshot of some of the responses we got on twitter about our hack.

- Posted at 12:38PM Feb 17, 2009 by Vittal P in Sun

Comments:

Real cool stuff. Great hack dude.

Posted by Tirthankar on February 17, 2009 at 05:49 PM IST #

Thanks Tirthankar ! :)

Posted by Vittal on February 17, 2009 at 06:48 PM IST #

Yahoo! Hack Day India 09 @ TAJ Residency, Bangalore

I am still at the Yahoo Hack Day India, and am enjoying every bit of it. The Hack Day India started at 9 AM, on 14th February, 2009. It will go on till 6PM, 15 February, 2009. I will be updating this blog frequently throughout the event. Theres a comprehensive coverage of the event. Visit the blog for the latest updates.

Day - 1 ---- 14th February, 2009

8:40 AM : Reached the TAJ Residency, Bangalore. The lobby was bustling with eager hackers and newbies. We were each given a Yahoo id card and were tied a Yahoo wrist band after which I went to the buffet table for my breakfast. There were idlis, vadas, mashed potatos, scrambled eggs, corn flakes, chocos, doughnuts, a couple of other things which I forgot, papaya juice, watermelon juice, tea and coffee. After a sumptous breakfast it was time to get ready for the hack.

9:00 AM : Attended a session at the Trinity Hall on BOSS (Build your OWN Search Service) by Christian Heilmann. The hall had loads of Yahoo bean bags and I made myself comfortable on some of them.

10:00 AM : I was now in the Vijayanagar 1 Hall to attend the session on YQL (Yahoo Query Languge) by Nagesh Susarla. It was a great insight into how we could use SQL similar statements to query the WEB!

11:00 AM : There was another shift in the hall. This time from Vijayanagar 1 to Vijanagar 2 for a session onYahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) again by Christial Heilmann. It was a rejuvenating event into the world of User Interface. YUI API's is aimed at providing the developer a browser indepedent UI development tool.

12:00 Noon : I was back in the Trinity Hall. There was another session going on, but was in no mood to attend it. Me along with my team mates, Nitin, Lakshman and Phaneendra started discussing on what Hack we could develop in a span of 24 hours. The trinity hall was loaded with Yahoo! Bean bags and we made ourselves comfortable on them. Each of us arranged two to three bean bags to suit our comfort levels. I was on these Bean Bags for about 90% of the event :P

01:00 PM : Sharp at 1PM, David Filo, the co-founder of Yahoo entered the room and started off the Hacking session. The room had a LCD screen which started countdown from 24:00:00.0. After his brief talk, I had the chance to meet him and take a photograph with the Yahoo! co-founder David Filo! A really superb moment.

Me (second from left) with David Filo (second from right), co-founder of Yahoo!

02:00 PM : Lunch time. Menu - Frankies, salads, juice. Only things in the veg category.

03:00 PM : Back to the Trinity Main Hall. Installed the softwares I required for the hack day. JDK, NetBeans, ANT, Sun SPOT SDK.

05:00 PM : High Tea. Some snacks for rejuvenation.

06:00 PM : After a lot of discussions, settled on a hack idea. My job was to interface the SPOTs with the PC and make it do some tricks. :P

07:00 PM : Coding ...... Free Red Bull. There was a huge bucket, We could drink any number of cans :)

07:30 PM : Time when Hack-a-Valentine started. There was a dance team called Shadows-1 who performed a group dance, and duet Salsa and finally another group dance.

09:00 PM : Dinner time. Menu - Rotis, Ghee Rice, a couple of side dishes, Russian Salad, Green Salad, Dhai Papdi Chat and for desserts, fruits, Rasmalai and strawberry pastry. The dinner was Yummmmm........

10:00 PM : Coding ...... Communication between the basestation and the freerange SPOTs was established.

11:00 PM : Coding ......

Coding all through the night

----------------------------------------- END OF DAY ONE ---------------------------------------------------------

Day - 2 ------- 15th February, 2009

00:00 - 05:00 AM : Coding .......... :)

This was how comfortable my location was :) The pic was taken around 3:30AM.

05:00 - 05:55 AM : Sleep, Joking with friends laughing out loud, disturbing others.

05:55 - 06:20 AM : Was updating my blog......

06:20 - 07:30 AM : Sleeping .........

08:00 - 09:00 AM : Sumptuous Breakfast. Menu - Paneer Parotas, Bread, Corn Flakes, Chocos, Cakes, Doughnuts, Omelette, Potato Wedges, Fruits, Grape and Sweet Lime Juice, Tea and Coffee.

10:00 AM : Faced a huge crisis. A major part of the project was not working. Tried all sorts of hacks and tweaks, but to no avail.

11:00 AM : Ongoing Crisis. Thought of withdrawing from the competition. Side-by-side, I was still trying to find a way out of the crisis.

12:00 AM : I found a way to go around the problem. Utterly stupid idea, but it got us out of trouble. I finally got the project working at 12:30 PM. What a relief that was !!! Phew !!!

01:00 PM : Lunch. A light lunch, with a minimal menu for veggies. But at that time, I was thinking only about our demo later in the afternoon.

02:30 PM : Demos start with David Filo, Sophie, and others as the judges. We were the last team and we wanted to make a huge impression on the crowd when we left the stage.

04:00 PM : Time for our demo. Had a stupendous appreciation from the crowd, especially for the Sun SPOTs programming. Nevertheless, the whole project came out very well. The Sun SPOTs displayed "NEW MESSAGE" when my friend sent a me a message through the Yahoo! Messenger.

04:30 PM : Tea with lots of snacks. Mini pizzas, Veg Puffs, some burger-kind-of-a-thing, cakes, sweets and Tea and Coffee.

06:00 PM : Results were set to be announced. We were in a very high spirit, especially after the response we go from the crowd. Sadly, we werent the winners. The Hack which was conducted by the winning teams, had used a lot of Yahoo! tools and software. So that is where, I feel we lost out on the prize, an Apple iPhone !!! :(

06:15 PM : End of event!

I am still pissed off that we didnt win the prize, but nevertheless, I came out with tonnes of goodies. Things which I came out with:

1. Yahoo! Research and Development Pen.

2. Yahoo! Stickers. Lots of them.

3. Yahoo! Swag Bag.

4. Yahoo! Hack Day T-Shirt.

5. Yahoo! BEAN BAG !!!!!!

Yahoo! allowing each of us to carry an Bean Bag was extremely generous of them. I am so happy that I have a bean bag in my house now. :)

- Posted at 08:34PM Feb 16, 2009 by Vittal P in Sun

OSUM - Registrations

Recently we had our intra-collegiate fest i.e. on Nov 7th and Nov 8th 2008. Our college fest is named "Parichay". One these 2 days there are a lot of technical events along with cultural and literary events which take place. I used these 2 days to my advantage for conducting a mass OSUM registrations.

On these 2 days I kept our college Internet Lab open and took in people for the OSUM registrations. I made announcements on the stage that such a registration is taking place in the Internet Lab and each person who registers gets a Open Solaris Indiana Student kit, the Netbeans CD along with the SUN Keychains and Pen.

Goodies

The response I got was amazing. There were a lot of people who came for the registrations and I had to literally control the crowd. Along with me was a friend (Sharan G.S) who helped me with the registration process. We asked each person to take a PC and log into the OSUM website. While they were creating a profile for themselves we explained about the benefits of joining OSUM and we got a good response from the crowd. We then directed them to join the RNSIT OSUM group. Once this was done each registrant was given the goodies as promised. They went out with a happy face. :)

This mass registration enabled me to get over 100 members in out coll's OSUM group. This was a very satisfying moment for me. Once I reached the 100 mark, Gary sent a mail saying that I had earned my team a Pizza Party. Thank you very much for the generous offer Gary.

More Registrations

Apart from the 100 registrants there are also a couple of other things that I would like to tell you. As the registrations were going on, and we were distributing the goodies, there were a lot enthusiastic people who enquired about the contents of the DVDs. I told them the benefits of using Open Source Software and the variuos features of the Indiana OS and Netbeans IDE. They were keen to try it out and I am sure some of them would have gone home and installed the softwares to have a look at it.

- Posted at 05:07PM Nov 15, 2008 by Vittal P in Sun

Comments:

It's very good organisation to concret student carrier.

Posted by punyasloka Muduli on March 10, 2009 at 12:10 PM IST

It's Sun platfom student are interact eachother & perfom own ability.

Posted by Punyasloka Muduli on March 10, 2009 at 12:13 PM IST

Software Freedom Day - A Huge Hit!!!

Well guys, I finally finished conducting the first SFD celebrations in our college. And it was a wonderful feeling. Here in this blog I will tell you all the important things that happened over the course of the day, I will try to put in as much information as possible.

When I reached college at 8:15 am there were people who had come already and were trying to get into the lab. At around 9 am there was such a huge crowd that we had to take some serious measures to control it. There were more than 100 people trying to get in and unfortunately we couldn't let them all inside as there was a space constraint. There were also some technical issues that were to be handled, so we postponed the event to 9:45am. But once the event started, there was nothing to hold us back.

Open Solaris Indiana installed on all the PCs. This picture was taken just before the start of the session.

The event started at 10:00am with Introduction to Open Source Technologies. I was the one who gave this presentation and this was the first time I was addressing such a huge crowd. I wasnt at all nervous which is quite a big change in me. As the event was delayed I had to go a little bit fast and that I did. But when I saw the time at the end of my presentation it was 10:35am. I had talked non-stop for 35 minutes!!! I couldnt believe it myself. I had never thought that I could go for such a long time alone. Now that I have done it, I have gained a lot of confidence and am ready to conduct more such events in the future. My Introduction was about the essence of Open Source and how we as students could contribute to Open Source. And the major part was how SUN had contributed to Open Source and a brief overview of SUN Technologies.

This is me during my presentation.

After my presentation there was an Installation fest. This was taken up by Nitin Rao (7th sem, ISE, RNSIT) and he did a very good job at it. He taught the students how to install a guest OS on an host OS using Virtual Box. The students were also excited to try it out on their own. This took place till 11:15am.

Once the mass installation was over it was time for Sham Pavman (JSSATE SUN CA) to take the center stage. We introduced Sham to the crowd and told them that he had recently won an award for his contribution to Bellenix OS. There was a huge cheer for him and he explained in detail about what he had done for his project to get the recognition he got. You can go over to his blog to learn more about his project. Once this was done he took up the task of giving an Introduction to Open Solaris. This he did so well that people were keen to listen more about the OS even after his presentation, His presentation went on till 12:30pm and by then many people were hungry. As we had started late we didnt give any break in between and hence gave an early lunch break at 12:30pm asking people to come back at 1:00-1:10pm.

The Hi-Tech lab was clogged during the sessions.

After the mass had gathered again, "The Big Bucks Bunny" video was played and everyone enjoyed it very much. Me mentioning that the video was made completely using open source technologies left many people aghast and as a result there were more eager faces to learn more about open source.

Harvesting this eagerness we started off with the NetBeans session which was conducted by Rohit K.V. (7th sem, CSE, RNSIT). I must say he did an amazing job. His session was very well planned out. He first gave a good introduction to what NetBeans was and how to start using it. He then went on to show how a mobile application could be developed using NetBeans Mobility. As this was a Hands on session all the attendees were trying it out along with Rohit K.V. He showed the people how to build a calculator for a mobile. The ending was also brilliantly planned. He showed how to transfer this application which was built right in front of them onto their mobiles. This live transfer of the application really got the crowd interested. They too tried and transfered their applications that they had built, onto their mobiles and were very happy to see their first mobile application work on their own mobiles.So great job there Rohit !

After all that bit of coding, it was time for some fun. The next session was again taken up by Nitin Rao and was about Compiz-Fusion. A small video was shown about Compiz-Fusion which got the crowd drooling. Then he showed how those things in the video could be done manually and each of them were very happy to try it on their own. The finale was again brillitant, where he wrote 'SFD 2008' using FIRE! What an effect that was. Thank you very much Nitin for doing such a wonderful job.

Finally it was time for the virtual internet session. And sadly I missed the whole session. :'-( I had to go home and get the goodies which were supposed to be distrubuted to the students at the end of the day. This session was taken by Sattvik Chakravarthy (7th sem, ISE, RNSIT). I will link the page to his blog so that you can read how that session went on.

I came back at 4:10pm and his session ended in 5 minutes' time. After that we distributed all the goodies to the attendees and by the looks on their face I was sure that they would have all gone home and tried out a couple of things done during the day, if not all.

All those people who had to go back by college bus left the hall. but more that 50% of them were still there. So we thought of entertaining them a bit more and had a surprise demonstration for them. That was SUN SPOTs!!! Sham Pavman had brought his SUN SPOTs to the event. So he gave a small demo about what SUN SPOTs actually were. He showed the ball game he had coded into the SUN SPOTs, which was really cool. In the other SUN SPOT there was a bit of a surprise for all of us. When he was moving them normally, there were a bit of lights flashing here and there and no one could make out what exactly was going on. But then he asked us to concentrate on the lights and started jerking the SUN SPOT only to our amazement. The movement brought out the letters "THIS IS A SUN SPOT" on the LEDs and he got a huge applause for that piece of magic.

So there ended and excitement filled day. It is really hard to pick the highlight of the day as I thought all the events were highlights on their own. But if you ask me to pick one event which made the day, it has to be the SUN SPOT demo. Hats off to Sham for such a nice demo, and I would like to thank him very much for coming to our college and making the event a huge success.

Finally I would like to thank all my friends who helped me in organising this event, helping me out in setting the PCs right and+ helping out the attendees during the course of the event. Thank You very much guys. None of these would have been possible without your support. Hoping for a similar involvement in future events.

SFD volunteer team !

Ok, then, thats all there to tell. I have been typing from a long time and my fingers are starting to ache. So see you all next time (hoping its not too long away), Bye till then.

- Posted at 12:59PM Sep 23, 2008 by Vittal P in Sun

Comments:

excellent work dude!!!!

Alas am not in any photos there :(, apart from the group photo!

Posted by Sham Pavman on September 28, 2008 at 11:09 PM IST

Not exactly. Look into the second photo. You are there in it, trying to take a photo at the far end of the lab :P

Posted by Vittal on October 13, 2008 at 09:12 PM IST

Plan For SFD 2008

This is the first SFD-Software Freedom Day, I will be conducting after I became the SUN CA for RNSIT. I was excited to conduct such an event in our college. There were lot of pre-event details I had to take care of like meet with the HoD, principal, director, etc etc. All these meets went well and I was allowed to conduct the event in our college. After this approval I contacted some of my friends who are also interested in conducting such events. They were excited about this and agreed to be an integral part of the SFD program and I thank them for helping me out.

After a couple of hours of brain-storming sessions and a visit to SUN Microsystems, we penned down the agenda for the day. The agenda was intended to cover as much as possible in one day and bring awarenes about open source technologies.The sessions were also planned in such a way that there were some fun events in between the technical or theoritical ones. So heres the agenda we put up for the SFD.

9:00am-9:45am :Introduction to Open Source --- Vittal (7th Sem CSE,SUN CA, RNSIT)

9:45am-10:30am :Open Solaris Installation Fest ---- Nitin Rao (7th Sem ISE,RNSIT)

10:30am-10:40am :Everyone present introduce themselves

10:40am-11:00am :Tea/Coffee Break

11:00am-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 : Vitrual Internet --- Sattvik Chakravarty (7th Sem ISE, RNSIT)

4:45pm : End of event.

I had asked our HoD to provide the Hi-Tech lab so that we could conduct hands on sessions side by side and we were given it. So the next thing for us to do was to set up the PC to our requirements.
Me and my friends spent a lot of time in the lab installing all the softwares in those PCs. We also installed Open Solaris Indiana on all of them. And finally there was the problem to network all the PCs for the Virtual Internet session. After hours of gruelling installations the PCs were ready for the event.

After this there was one more thing that needed to be done. That was campaining of the event. We went to every classin the CS and the IS department and announced about the event. The response was terrific and there were about 100 registrants. In fact there were even more people trying to register for the event but we could not accomodate them. We had to stop the registrations at 100 people which was sad. So I felt we did a very good job in campaining the event.

I will tell you about the event itself in my next blog post.

- Posted at 12:58PM Sep 23, 2008 by Vittal P in Sun

JASHAN - The Grand Ashoka

Finally the day arrived! 22nd August. This was the day I was waiting for from a long long time. This was the day that the SUN Annual Day celebrations JASHAN was scheduled to take place. The venue for this celebrations was the 5 star hotel The Grand Ashoka. From the moment I heard about the venue I was completely excited. I have stayed in Bangalore for most of my life and have heard so much about this magnificent hotel. But I have never been there. Now I have a chance to experience all that I have heard about this hotel on my own.

On 22nd I found out that the time for our performance was at 6PM. I had to attend college on that day as I had my lab in the afternoon. As soon as the lab session got over at 4PM I rushed back home and zoomed off to The Grand Ashoka. I finally reached the venue at 5:30 PM.I was awestruck by the majesticity of the hotel and its appeal. I was standing there staring the grand building.When I came back to my senses I realised that my other CA friends had already arrived at the place and were having last minute practices of the play. I too joined in at once. We were then asked to assemble at the backstage at 6PM. We all did so willingly. Some of them were nervous and some were not. I must tell you that I was not feeling nervous and I really dont know why I was feeling so. I usually get nervous before going onto the stage. But this time there was no such thing. In fact not feeling nervous made me nervous, if you know what I mean.We were then called onto the stage at 6:15PM and our play went on for 6 minutes. The play went on pretty OK. I say pretty OK because we knew we could do better. In fact we did much better during the rehearsals time. So we were having our high expectations about our ourselves. Saying this, I am not telling that our performance went bad. It did go well. The audience were appreciating and applauding the play whenever there were some catchy lines in the play and whenever the song syncing perfectly matched the tone of the play. So that was big satisfaction for us. But the thing that we could have done better will always be there in the back of our minds.

After finishing with the play, we headed out to the end of the audience looking for some softdrinks. And what we found over there was a bar! This was the first time I have ever visited a bar. There were all kinds of drinks being served over there for free. People were drinking beer, vodka, etc, etc. We students werent into drinking so we started heading back to some of the empty seats at the end. We were then told that softdrinks were also being served there. So we got ourselves a glass of sprite and started enjoying the show. The performances put forward by the SUN professionals were mostly good. We were amazed by the talent in those engineers. We enjoyed the dances, plays, etc and were chatting about how well we could have done in our own play.

After all this excitement it was time for dinner. This was the best part according to me. There were so many items on display that I was having a really hard time deciding which to try. If you are a food freak like me then you would have been in a real dilema.I apetizers in themselves were so many that I felt it like the main course. There were biriyanis, rotis,salads, chats, some item prepared in curd, two paneer items, a side-dish made of dal, sweet corn and spinach, rajasthani bindi fry, pastas, and many more. And all these things were on one of the many rows. I tried to have as many new things as I could, but still I couldnt try everything that was there on the menu. I was completely full by the time I had tried half of those items, and I had not yet come to the best part, the Desserts. The desserts section had mouth watering items. There was rasmalai, sweet syrup, pista ice cream and the my best item, the Chocolate Mousse. The mousse was so soft I just melted in my mouth, and if you were a chocolate lover like me, it was heaven! I couldnt control myself and had a big scoop of the delicious chocolate mousse.

Just when we were finishing u p with our desserts, the DJ started playing some cool music. There was this guy on the stage who was about my age (maybe 2 to 3 years older that me. He was supposed to be a great remixer. The remixes he sang were amazing. He had remixed completely different geners into one song and I must tell you it sounded very nice. The moment he started singing many people gathered around the stage area and started dancing. His music was so addictive and was pulling people towards the stage and making them dance.Theres one more thing. The singer was an IITian!!! He was from IIT-Chennai. The moment we heard this, we were stunned. I had never thought that an IIT geek could do such things. If you hadnt known he was form IIT, you could have easily mistaken him for a member of some band. The partnerhsip between him and the DJ was really good. It was like each were guessing each others next moves and the songs and music were being sung and played accordingly. The stage area was going berserk. Everyone were shaking their bodies to the tune of the songs. We CAs too joined in and enjoyed the atmosphere that was created. I have never had so much before. The dance floor was let loose and people of all ages were portraying the child in them. I am sure everyone would have gone home completely exhausted after the dance.

A small glance at the watch told me that it was 10:30PM and I had to travel a really long distance to get home. So I reluctantly left the dance floor, and so did my friends, We really wanted ot stay till the end of the show, but getting home was top priority. It was 11 PM by the time I reached home and I was completely exhausted. The next thing I remember after getting home is waking up the next morning.Its four days since all these things happened and I can still feel the euphoria in me hasnt died out. I have had a really wonderful experience by taking part in JASHAN. So I thank SUN whole heartedly for providing such a wonderful platform due to which we had some really sweet memories that will be embedded in our memories for ever......

Posted at 12:58PM Sep 23, 2008 by Vittal P in Sun

SUN Annual Day - Preparations

A couple of days back, I was called on my mobile by Mr Rajesh, SUNCA co-ordinator, and was asked to hold on for a conference call. I waited till the rest of the Bangalore CA's joined the conference call. We were all wondering what this was about? The Mr Rajesh said it out. "We are having a SUN Annual day on the 22nd August 2008, and we (SUN Team) would like the CA's to do something on that day."

Most of us were excited about this and agreed to do something. As it was an annual day, we had to perform some cultural activities and not have a technical presentation. Now that we had agreed, we needed to think about something to do on stage. A lot of ideas popped into our minds like enacting a skit,a group dance(which many opposed to), etc, etc. As the majority of them agreed for a small skit we stuck to it. Now we had to think of some nice small play to enact. We googled for it and found many plays, but none of us liked them.

One of the CA's Kavya from MSRIT suggested we do something like the one in "Mind Your Lnaguage". This was a tentative idea, and all of us wanted to discuss upon it. So we decided to meet at the SUN office the following day. When we all met the following day, another CA, Prajwal from UVCE, had thought of another small play and all of us liked it. So we decided to go forward with the new idea. Now the excitement rose. We discussed about this idea with the co-ordinator and once this was agreed, we started writing the script.

The script writing was fun. Each one of us had our own ideas and we took the best of them all. The dialouges were made as funny as possible. We tried to have multi-lingual dialouges and added filmy songs in the middle where ever we felt it was appropriate.The end product was a great script, which would make people laugh out.

Today we met for the informal reharsals. It went pretty well. There were yet more improvisations made to the script. There were some funny moments while we were acting and all of us had a great big laugh in the end. Once we thought we had caught hold of the expressions, we dispersed for the day. We CAs will be meeting again this week once before the actual D-Day. Hoping everything goes fine. Will tell you how it all went on after the actual show.I will also write about what the play was after our performance. Bye till then.

Posted at 12:56PM Sep 23, 2008 by Vittal P in Sun

Shifting of Blog posts from my SUN Microsystems Blog

For those of you who didnt know, I was a SUN Microsystems Campus Ambassador (SUNCA) during my final undergraduate year. Being a SUNCA has been one of the highlights of my UG life. It has taught me a number of things by me to express my skills while working with the team in SUN. When I was a SUN CA, I used to maintain a blog which I used to constantly update as and when I organised an activity in my college, or was part of an activity organised by SUN. With the recent developments of SUN's take over bid made by Oracle being approved by EU, I thought it would be a good idea to shift my blog posts from my SUN blog to this blog and I would be doing that immediately.

Back To Home

It had been close to 5 months since I had been away from my parents and moved to Singapore. This was the first time in my life that I had stayed alone for an extended period of time. When I first arrived in Singapore, I knew that it would be a challenge to be living alone without the help of anyone close to you. It sure was tough adjusting to this 'lonely' life in the first couple of months since I had moved here. But, then you have to move 0n and get acquainted with what life throws at you. And that I had done well. But as it got closer to the date of my flying back to Bangalore, all the beautiful memories of my childhood days came back to me and I was excited to get back to my HOME.

I knew that I would be staying there for a very short duration of time and that I had to make the most of it. And what better than stay at home and eat the good home cooked food and spend time with your parents? I must agree that I did not roam about much across Bangalore as I used to when I was living there. I stayed at home most of the time relaxing to the comforts of the environment that you know so well.

Before going back to Bangalore, I felt that I would embrace the place as soon as I land there and it would feel different (good different) to live in my room in my house, which I had missed for so long. Surprisingly, it did not feel at all different to go back to doing my old routines. It felt like I had never been out of that place and had been living there all these 5 months. This was shock to me as what I was feeling was completely different to what I had expected to feel. I had to come to terms with it and it took me some time to do so.

Just like all good times, the two weeks that I spent in Bangalore flew quickly and here I am, back in Singapore typing this blog post wondering how time never seems to be on your side by passing away quickly when you want it to slow down and being lethargic when you want it to fly away quickly. Nevertheless, now that I am back in Singapore, I cant wait to start working on my research which is the main reason for which I have come all the way here...