Archive for March, 2007

BMSLUG begins to Roll!!!

Saturday, March 24th, 2007

Praveen and myself have been working with the BMS College of Engineering folks for around a year now and things are beginning to show results.

Today we were there for a Installation and Troubleshooting session. The session was attended by around 50 - 60 students in one of the CS Labs. After briefing the FLOSS Philosophy and pros/cons of proprietary software to students (How FLOSS could help in Knowledge acquisition) , the installation session began. We had the asked the BMS LUG folks to handle it and they did it quite well. Installed Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on around 6 boxes that were offered by the BMS College Management.

BMSLUG Install Fest BMSLUG Install Fest BMSLUG Install Fest

A lot of doubts were cleared in the discusions that followed with active participation from the students themselves (not only asking questions but answering questions posted by their peers)

Whats astounding is these events are now being organised by second year students after some nice work/motivation from the current final years. They have already quite a few sessions planned up and also a major Awareness campaign around end of April for Bangalore Colleges.

Also there are now atleast 8 SoC project Applications going out from this college after some morale boosting sessions which Praveen, Akshay (BMS Final Year), Srikanth and myself had with these folks a couple of weeks before.

Happy to see the BMS LUG begining to ROCK!! Keep Rolling mates! And the end feedback was that the students asked for more such informative sessions. Nice to hear this!
Pics here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuxmaniac/sets/72157600024313523/

OT: BMS College has a Mountaineering Club!!! They do rock climbing, mini bunjee jumping and stuff during the weekends! Surprised me!!

BMSCE Mountaineering Club BMSCE Mountaineering Club BMSCE Mountaineering Club

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Flying.. No more a Luxury!!!

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

This is not the first time I am exposed to such mis management of Air travellers by the so called “Budget” Airlines. These budget airlines are compromising on Passenger Hospitality for the reduction in cost or is there really a _reduction_ or _difference_ in cost??? I still wonder. Yesterday I was flying to Chennai from Bangalore on SpiceJet. I land up around 45 minutes before the schedules departure of the flight to see a “big” line to check in. Reason: Server is down all over India and they are issuing Manual boarding passes with no Seating. First Come (into the aircraft) and first grab your seat. They gave this a name “Free Seating” bah!!!! There was a point in which the Boarding passes also got over. LOL. :D

Check In Queue My Boarding pass A part of the queue waiting for Security Check Some more queue for Security check

Ok. Now I am done with the check in process. I head to the security check. Even longer queue in Hundreds :O Only two gates and for so many scheduled aircrafts???? The Bangalore Airports Authority better look into this issue. This is getting very very common nowadays. To top it none of the Airlines (especially evening flights) are on time nowadays. Minimum 30 minutes delay. Reason again a very common one “The delay is due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft from XYZ. AAA Airlines Regrets the inconvenience caused to its passengers. Thank you” At least Airlines like the Kingfisher and Jet takes care of the hospitality part very well. No wonder their rates are a bit on the higher side. But thats what I call “Value” for “Money” :D

Bangalore being a IT hot spot or whatever people keep calling it; such inconveniences / mismanagement / poor infrastructure have to be taken note of. If you are one from AAI reading this blog, “Think and Act”.

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Maths, Vocabulary, Goals and Desire

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Having decided to take a day off from work today I did some interesting and different things. I badly wanted to take a day _completely_ for myself. No Code, No Usual rants, No Gadgets and any other usual routine stuff!! The first half of the day I spent time in solving Maths puzzles/problems in Trigonometry, Algebra and some Vector Calculus. Really felt nice and good after a long long time. (Though I have lost touch in these couple of years) Then I added some words to my vocabulary and wrote some flash cards. By this time it was around lunchtime. The other half of the day was spent on a lot of self introspection, goal settings, plan of actions etc. In the recent few days I always had the feeling that my life is going goalless and direction less and hence wanted to have a clear roadmap to work upon. The difference between “Goal” and “Desire” is that “Goal” is in our hands i.e under our complete control whereas “Desire” isn’t. Hence I decided to take my life back under control by sorting out a lot of things. Tried the good old technique of mind mapping which had always come to my rescue in the past, assigned priorities, laid down action points and deadlines. Relaxed myself at the cozy comfort of the Barista couch sipping Cappuccino. And here I am back with a lot of energy and mental clarity to get going with “MY” Life.

I guess it is very important for everybody to take such breaks to analyse and sort things in life. One might argue that “Weekends” are always there for those. But somehow the whole “weekend for self” concept is nt very convincing and has never worked for me. But this mid-week break seems to do a lot of good.

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FOSS.NITC - Filled with Fun and Learning

Monday, March 5th, 2007

Here I am back in Bangalore with fond memories of FOSS.NITC 2007 which got concluded yesterday. I landed up in Calicut at around 05 30 hrs on Saturday 3rd March 2007. Basil (a student organiser) picked me up and was given accomodation at the International Hostel. After catching up with some sleep, I got ready for having my breakfast and then proceed to the event. At breakfast I met Pramode (A person on whose hit list I have found a place ;-) Reason: I ditched Insignia organisers), Anivar, Praveen, Hiran, Kushal. I proceeded to the hall in which my talk was supposed to be held. Shakthi a.k.a mbuf was taking a session on Alliance VLSI CAD Tools. I gave a talk on Icarus Verilog and Free EDA Tools followed by a short presentation on OpenMoko.

Gang of Four :-) Jace giving gyan on blogging Gang of Four :-) Jace.. IBM team Holi@NITC Audience

We had nice yummy lunch. The Fruit salad and ice cream were mmmm.. Then it was time for some photography, networking, mentoring and ofcourse a lot of fun. In the evening, Pramode and myself conducted a BoF on “Students Contribution to FLOSS”. The organisers were so co-operative that they shifted me to the Guest House upon my request so that I could be with the gang. After dinner,Parthan and me proceeded to the Software Systems lab to catch up on mails. Meet Mr. Empty Mind sitting and trying to setup a laptop for his talk the next day. Around 0100 Hrs on Sunday, I decided to head back to the guest house only to find Mr. Empty Mind still missing. I carried my cot (in pradeepto’s terms mattresses) to Pradeepto’s and Parthan’s room and decided to crash there.

Vivek and Parthan Parthan on Tricks with Shell Empty_Mind Pradeepto.

Next day began with me attending Pradeepto’s one and a half hour talk. (Err wait did I say something??? He forgot to stop and continued for 3 full hours) Side- effect of that was Parthan became bran dead for his talk that was supposed to have followed pradeepto’s. Man, Jace’s blog Camp was really uber c00l. I loved it. We proceeded to the valley after a informal “Prize Distribution” function ;-) . We had a nice time in the valley and headed for Dinner at Malabar Palace. The Appams and Stew were tasty to its limits. After dinner, it was time to board the bus back to Bangy. Reached Bangy at around 0630 hrs on Monday morning. It still amazes me “How in such a short span of time these NITC Folks have managed to make FOSS.NITC a nationwide Community event”. Keep it up guys.
Accomplishment of my missions will be known in the coming days :-) For more pics click here.

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Off to God’s own country with a mission…

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

I am off to NIT, Calicut (Kerala, INDIA) for the annual FLOSS Meet.Excited to meet up with quite a few people there. My missions.

1. Pull in Students for the FLOSS EDA tool development and make them aware of the various possibilities with FLOSS EDA Tools.

2. OpenMoko - Story telling

3. BoF on Students Contribution to FLOSS. (I will definitely be eyeing atleast a couple of people into the gnusim8085 and the next project gnusim8051 :-) )

See you all with the pics and updates on my mission in my next post.. Bbye!

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