Foss.In @ Bangalore

Hello everybody,
Here I am back with my fresh holiday spirits, this time with a really cool experience. Yes, it all happened when we planned something useful for this vacation. It was Sagar who had told us about some conference that was to be held at Bangalore about various open source technologies, myself and ma friend kp registered at that particular website. We were happy that we got something to spend our holidays, and we were more happy, when we thought of Bangalore.

Things were going fine and we got all our tickets reserved and the final day come. We completed all our semester exams and started off the beautiful journey, expecting a dull conference and a cool bangalore. We were more concerned about visiting all the tourist spots and malls in and around bangalore. Finally we landed at bangalore. My friends stayed at a different place and I got my accommodation in a place far away from the venue. The venue was the Nimhans Convention Centre, Laccasundra and I stayed at Marathalli. So the first day I just got pissed off looking at bangalore's traffic and those boards of the buses, most of which were written in Kannada. I was totally blind. I dint know where to go, I dint know how to go and finally I saw a building which was similar to the one given in the foss.in website from the bus and just jumped out of it. Luckily it was the venue for the mighty foss.in

I was in a very formal wear, and I expected people to be seen around in Blazers. But to my shocking surprise, people were in T-Shirt and shorts. Oh man, I was just amazed and learnt the truth from the really geeky environment. It was really amazing to see all people whose laptops were filled with stickers of various open source projects. We gained interest and understood that something interesting was about to happen. It was a great start, with foss.in tradition: No chief guest, no inaugural ceremonies, It was really a cool way to start with people from different parts of the country lighting up the holy lamp.

The hall was provided with Wi-Fi and there were three majestic auditoriums and a huge workspace for the work outs. The sessions were really amazing, be it the e-pub or the session on making our identity open though identi.ca it was really amazing. It was really a variety show. The team really forgot about all the tour plans and we were just into the sessions by time. Be it a work out or the talk, the enthu level was very high and was pretty interesting.

It was a healthy competition between the KDE and the GNOME people. And suddenly i recognised some one, whom I had met already. It was Abhishek, our super senior at college currently working for Sun. We were really happy to meet him. I also met Mr.Sriram Narayanan along with Abhishek and it was a great experience talking with them about Belenix and Solaris. The features like zones, the time machine snapshots and the dtrace of the zfs file system snatched our hearts and immediately i had installed belenix in my system that very night. Hats off to the zfs file system. I had also signed an agreement with Intel, for being a part of the Moblin development team, helping them to make it available in regional languages and to do some translation stuff. Its a cool experience to support Intel.

And finally you all would ask me... What is the tangible benefit you got from foss.in??? Here is the answer for all you people, I was not a linux freak before I had attended foss.in. In fact I had used linux just to watch movies and had never worked before in linux or solaris and obviously it was windows for me in all ma technical role. But I learnt the beautiful source of development, which would be a great experience and realised that there are miles to go in the open source field before I sleep. In one word I would say,

Foss.in 2009 was a launchpad for me to Foss.in 2010

To sum up, it was the best of its kind at foss.in. We were so involved and occupied by foss in such a way that I dint even see Lal Bagh after a six day visit to bangalore ;-). It was a great learning experience and a chance to meet a global team, sorry the global family of open source. People who's presence was felt by me in the mailing lists had coffee with me, just un believable. It was just like a family get together, but a global family in this case irrespective of caste, colour and creed. Thanks to FOSS :)

The Online Feedback System

Hello everybody,
Here comes ma next post after a huge huge interval. You know, things just took away my time and it is this period of my life, during which i understood what hard work is and the meaning of the word "Busy". Yes, it was the completion time of my project and exams. Coming to the project, which I had never ever mentioned before in my blog, it is the Online Feedback System developed for my university. Here goes the details of the web application.

History:
It is actually a custom practice in SASTRA to get the feedback from the students about the courses they had learnt and also the faculty members. Its a hilarious task you know. Papers will be provided to all and collected back. Then synchronising the reports was a hell task for the people in the university. Also a lot of paper and man power was wasted for this particular report generation. So the open source community at SASTRA, GLOSS decided to take up the big deal and accomplish a fully paperless system, that would get the input from the students and give a clear snapshot on all the courses and faculty members of the university. To tell about GLOSS, its a dynamic open source community having its base at SASTRA
and led by the dynamic leader, Mr.Dwarakanath, Sun Campus Ambassador, SASTRA.

Specifications:
The app has been developed using PHP and MySQL, and the front end obviously using basic HTML. The app was specially designed in a very light fashion, in order to handle the huge traffic of 10,000 users. Thanks to PHP and MySQL, the best combo ever for giving us such a light platform, that handled traffic pretty decently. It was really a cool experience.

The Team:
Well, the project was assigned to two second years, the soul reason being the need to maintain the app for the upcoming years. Myself and Karthik Prashanth(The famous KP) took up the charge under the grand leadership of Dwarak. You know this was the first team in my life with which i felt totally comfortable and in fact i realised what actually team work. Telling about Dwarak, words are actually inadequate to tell..! But still I ll give a try. It was his momentum that powered the entire project. Be it a technical issue, or a need for infrastructure, we rush to him and he has a solution for every thing. And it was he who deployed the entire application the server after optimizing and setting our code to meet the format of the data given. And coming to KP, man he's really a cool guy to work with. Its difficult to make him work, but once he starts working, things are entirely perfect with him and he is the one who understands my code :). He had teached me on the fly, how to deal with a team. It was really a great experience working with KP. And the main reson behind the successful completion of the system was the momentum given by Dwarak, and the way the team worked. When one's momentum was down, the other's would be on the peak.

The experience:
You know its such a great great learning experience to build an real time system.The fun part of it was while deploying the application. Actually in the data we received, details of some 1500 students were missing. The system was up and it was then we identified this. You know people started calling me up and it was that day in which I attended some 43 phone calls in toto. It was like running here and there to see people giving their feedback in the system with which we had lived for almost one semester. Then the system was made down in the afternoon and then we made it up again after a lot of chaos and confusion. The team had spent sleepless nights to make the system up. But after a lot of hard work, it was a tired morning when I woke up. I casually took out the newspaper and it had an article featuring the online feedback system. It was just a sweet shock to see that, and the greatest thing was the dean had announced a cash price of Rs 10,000. Just awesome moments those were. But above all those material benefits, the learning experience was totally chill and the satisfaction we get when we see people using our system was amazing, and that was one particular feeling which I had never had in my life.

Thanks all:
And finally, thanks to all who had directly/indirectly helped us bringing our system up. Thanks to the students of our University, who had whole heartedly used the system. Thanks to the University for giving us such an opportunity for in house development. You scarcely see universities trusting students and giving such real time stuff.

The links:
The System:
The page on Hindu: