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 :)

Software Freedom Week Celebrations..!

Hi people,
As a part of the GLOSS team, we are celebrating the software freedom day(Its a week for all of us). The software freedom day is being celebrated through out the world on 20th September. But in SASTRA, we have classes till 4.50, and the only time you can go around and do such stuff is after 5. So as a part of we preaching open source, we had decided to make it a software freedom week..! All the celebrations take place at Tifac Seminar Hall-2 for the 5 days between 21.09.09 and 25.09.09. The schedule is as follows:

Day 1:Introduction to FOSS/Open Source
Day 2:Linux Install Fest
Day 3:Netbeans 6.7
Day 4:Glassfish & My SQL
Day 5:Insight on open source projects.

This is the schedule for the week and right now, I am blogging after the first session came to a successful close. Yeah, though it was a rainy day around 60 people turned up and the GLOSS team was satisfied with the crowd. Dwarakanath our campus ambassador conducted the session in his own way of evangalising things and he was cool as usual and this time his slides were so cool with babies(Inspired by me I believe :)) He gave an orientation about the celebrations and the way things happen in the corporate world.

As for as I am concerned, he is the only person bridging the university students with the real industry and he proved it again on the first day of the software freedom week celebrations. The way he made the examples, one in layman's term and the other being the real situation in the industry was really appealing. He also insisted on the availability of a digital identity for each and every individual.

Then was a small meeting of the organisers. We got ourselves prepared for the Linux intallation fest to be held on tuesday. We got the CD's and also learnt how to install Linux stuff like fedora and ubuntu. I have installed Ubuntu in my laptop now and I am comfortable with it(Currently blogging from Ubuntu). So I was really happy with the way things happened and I am having a great week ahead, an open week full of freedom, with no Gates and Windows to stop my freedom..!

Open Source For Students...

Hi everybody,
25th august(2009), was another festive day for GLOSS, the open source community at SASTRA. Posters were put up with the title "Open Source For Students", a talk by Sun's marketing engineer. The session was unusually planned at 11.30 and I was a bit shocked. Because nowadays in SASTRA you could find only 15 heads turning out for a session at evening 5. But to my surprise the Tifac-Auditorium was full. I realised the power of GLOSS then. It was Kumar Abhishek, 2009 passed out of SASTRA university. Its always good to hear something from our brother, rather than hearing it from uncles and grandpas. We were all really happy to see such a dynamic person coming again live on stage, because I was in my first year, when Kumar Abhishek was here and I don't have personal contacts with him. He is also one of the founding members of GLOSS and it was really a great experience with him on stage.

The way he handled the session was really interesting and pretty different. He was so active on stage, so that the crowd never got bored, inspite of the hot audi, without A/C. He spoke about the past, present and the future trends in IT. And he mainly concentrated on the future trends and also, made us realise that we are developers but not users. It was pretty interesting, when he told us about the stuff on net like youtube and all other stuff regarding OS. It had quenched my thirst for a really great session, after a long gap. The energy level was high and was maintained constantly through out the session. And all the other arrangements made by GLOSS was also cool. Dwarakanath hosted the show in his unique style and Open Solaris DVD's where distributed to all and the blogging contest was announced. But that is not the reason why I am writing this blog for, but I couldnt stop blogging about this great event. Thanks to GLOSS for bringing in such highly dynamic personalities and making us ready to swim in the corporate ocean. Meet you in my next blog...