Mukthi 8.03 Day2

Day 2

Began with a lot of fiddling around with the projector and Shreyas's macbook,so finally we all sat around his Mac in a small group and he gave us his talk,he spoke about Clutters,he held all of us with interest and answered one basic question that bugs all beginners-"Where do I start from ?"

Noon ,one of the talks that i eagerly awaited-"switching to Linux",presented by Vivek.This was the best talk I could relate to.He gave a crisp talk,citing all the stuff available on Linux making it more than good to switch over.

Amarok,Rhythm Box,VLC -deadly matches to the outdated Windows Media Player :)
Torrents -Deluge
Gnome baker-disc burner vs Nero
Pidgin-IM works well even with windows :)
GIMP,Dreamweaver plenty of options to choose from,this talk charged me up and I have FedCore running on my system and gives me more reasons to use it more regularly :)

The day went on with sessions from Poornima on GCC-lot of gyan but pretty nice,
Archana gave a demo on Greasemonkey,this was also a nice one,she gave us a proper run through and I am using Greasemonkey now ,comes with a million scripts and if you do try it,blink twice ,read and install scripts only that you trust :)

They ended it finally with Laxman speaking about WINE,very interesting again,but I am not sure if I will get to using it finally.
And yes,almost slipped out of my mind,Thoughtworks ,the main sponsor for this event gave a talk on Ruby on Rails,touted the next big thing after Java !

The last part was the quiz that the CS quizzers conducted.WTF ,i wanted to scream out when some seniors who have already passed out and are apparently quizzers themselves walked in and participated in it and walked away with the prize,forget that,where in the hell is the spirit man,We are beginners and we have no bones about accepting that but mocking us that way is unreasonable,...yeah well,we didnt even turn in our answers ,we obv knew we dont stand a chance.

So pls take note,next year,if you have a quiz,make sure you know what kind of crowd you are dealing with and set it at that level,Dont keep it to entertain yourselves(the quizzers)There is no point in doing that ! If you think we stand no where in the race,thank you very much,but you can conduct a separate quiz for those guys ...

That ends Mukthi 8.03 :)

Hope it will be much more liberating next year ...

Mukthi 8.03 Day 1

looong pending post :)
Day 1@Mukthi 8.03

This is an annual FOSS event conducted by the Linux User Group VRLINUG at MSRIT,Bangalore .

They have a nice way of naming it every year, this time it was Mukthi 8.03 signifying year ’08 and month March :) , the previous one was version 7.04 (Hope my memory is right)

This year they gave us barely a day to register and though last year almost 80% of the sessions simply flew over my head, this time I decided to give it another shot since well, I had taken the OS and Unix course in 5^th semester and I felt that I should be able to at least “recognize” some of the geeky terms flying around in the event.

Last year there was a huge turnout; literally, our entire seminar hall was packed to full capacity of 300, this is an intra-college event guys, so considering that I think that is HUGE! But many of us were completely disappointed and frustrated with last year’s event since we didn’t even know what a kernel was :( and many such terms kept popping up repeatedly in the sessions and most of us were at a total loss.

This year though, I was a wee bit more confident of being able to follow some talks. The crowd was a mere 30-40 students ,reason probably being that there was just a day for them to publicize the event or people genuinely didn’t want to sign up ?yet, the event’s target audience is mainly the VRLINUG who organize ,participate and ensure the entire event goes smoothly. So thumbs up for that one though!

Day 1 kicked off with Rahul Sundaram giving us an opening talk about FOSS(Free and Open Source s/w) and its growth et all. He repeatedly stressed the need for us to wake up and realize to this other world of OS :).

Then Peter Thomas gave us a short demo on Java in the world of FOSS, here too, since I am totally alien to Java, most of it flew over this tiny brain :) but I liked his talk somehow. He gave us a demo of his Indian open source project JTrac and spoke about JBoss, JMeter and other development tools. He signed off by giving an interesting list of sites to browse through...I must admit one thing, I never completely decipher what these guys are talking about until I come back home and run a search on it and follow it up, it takes time and that turn offs many participants, especially ones like me who are not really ardent users of Linux, at Mukthi..

Then we had demos by some of our seniors...Sriram Kashyap ran us through Blender, which is an interesting tool that performs a variety of functions on 3-D content and showed us how to create a simple poster.

Shegde spoke about Gedit as an alternative to the painful Vi :) with some fallouts here and there.

Fitting finale to Day1 was the movie screening of “Revolution OS “, a 2001 documentary, I guess the name says most of it :)

Revolution OS Trailer

Need the entire movie ? Watch it here



Still got time to read what happened @Day2,click here

Bucket List

Firstly what is a bucket list; I came to know about it from the movie of the same name that I watched recently….Click here to know more

So here goes mine …

Karma

• Pledge my eyes.
• Teach blind kids dance or make them put up a show/play/anything on stage.
• Do SOMETHING for disabled kids,maybe as simple as spending time with them, teach them something fun and useful.
• Have a pottery or a painting session with kids.
• Have a read aloud session for school kids,which book,I am undecided on which book though.
• Volunteer to lend a helping hand to any organization that works with animal care.
• Make atleast one person smile each day of my life.
• Complain less(This one is tough! )

Material Girl

• Go deep sea diving .
• Try sky diving.
• Visit the best spa in the world and get pampered all day.
• Get tattooed,Color my hair red.
• Have a Christian wedding –white dress,cake,wine et all.
• Watch Hrithik roshan’s moves up close,in reality.
• Listen to heaven-Bryan Adams live on stage.
• Watch Rafa and Maria in action live. :)
• Learn Belly dancing or Ballet. :P
• Watch an f1 race upclose.
• Meet J.K.Rowling ,Robin Cook,Gregory David Roberts,Dan Brown ,ok asking for too much,atleast meet one of them someday. :)
• Buy the most beautiful pair of diamond chandelier earrings with my salary,someday,also take mom on a helicopter ride.

SKYDIVE Wooo hooo

Shantaram

I bought Shantaram a couple of months ago.

As sheepishly mentioned before,I bought it with great enthusiasm hoping that I would read the book and enjoy Deepa Mehta’s movie better .For the uninitiated, read this

Now this idea was almost shelved, after many ifs and buts,I finally decided to give the 933 paged book a try .

The story begins with Roberts escaping from a maximum security prison in Australia and landing up in India,here begins his journey ,a fantastic,almost fictional tale(I would say so since his experiences are narrated superbly -quite hard to believe)

The central characters are strongly highlighted all throughout the book.Prabhaker-the naïve yet smart guide,Karla-the woman who stole Robert’s heart,Khader Bhai-the leader of the Bombay Mafia..All the characters are etched out beautifully and just blend with the backdrop of his tale .

Robert’s tale is inspiring,interesting and makes you look at India both in awe and disgust.With corruption,drugs,mafia and scandals galore it shows you the deep,dark Mumbai,yet the people at the slum,Prabhaker’s zest towards life and several other things bring about a smile to your face.

The book makes you laugh,cry,sympathize,worry,complain--A mixed bag of all emotions !

I was hooked on to the book thoroughly and thanks to Google images,I checked out what Roberts looks like..I was quite taken aback .I also saw the Leopold café that is the backdrop for most of the events occurring throughout the book .

Shantaram is the gripping tale of a man’s journey throughout Mumbai and his vast multitude of experiences. I am so eager to visit some of the places described in his work,that is the power of his narration .Roberts has mastered Hindi after his stay in India and also speaks Marathi !The novel was trashed twice after Roberts wrote it in prison.

I strongly recommend Shantaram to anyone who would be interested in getting a closer look at Mumbai- in its entirety.

Yes,the book can get quite a bit boring in between but it’s an experience in itself to finish the book.I was left craving for more,I wanted to know what happened to Roberts after his stay in Mumbai .Some sites tell me he has plans to write another book on what happened next in his life . Do give this book a try,you wouldn’t want to miss it :)

More recently,Gregory David Roberts was spotted at the LIFW on 30^th March’08

Read more about it here …

These standing babas find a mention in Shantaram :)

Parents

This is a post from my friend Chi's Blog

Click here to see it

I loved its relevance ......

We have something to learn from this story :)

March Off !

The march that just marched away

March was a hectic month...

In the first week, we began rehearsing vigorously for our Departmental Talents Day Show.

In the second week, Mukthi happened. Read my Mukthi post here

It is a two day FOSS event that aims to build greater awareness about open source through talks and demos on the latest trends in Open Source and involves interacting with people from the industry. More on Mukthi in a separate post.

During this period, I took to reading “Shantaram” by Gregory David Roberts, I shall admit the book is about 900 and odd pages and I didn’t want to stop reading it half way due to lack of time .

But soon I was lost in the fantastic, almost fictional tale and I strongly recommend the book to anyone .The Hitch is- in between, the book has a slightly slower pace .this is the point where most readers (whom I have come across) tend to quit reading it. Stay patient and you will enjoy the book.

I did not experience this burst of boredom anywhere while I was reading the book. I will sheepishly tell you that I was imagining Johnny depp as Shantaram all the while and it made my read thoroughly interesting! I am so eager to watch the movie, but with all the rumors flying around I doubt if it will happen soon. Read my post on Shantaram here.

I finished the book and then the internals landed on me, phew! I wrote some amazing pieces of non-technical jargon :-) and managed to get some decent scores in only a couple of subjects. The saddest thing about our university VTU and this course called Engineering is you wake up only when the exams and internals are only a week away and cram like there’s no tomorrow..

On the final day of my internals was our Talent’s Day...it was a beautiful show put up by our voISE Team and a huge success. Will write a post on it soon, no, I am not kidding, promise :-)

In between all this,I managed to catch "The Bucket List" ,I liked the movie,It set me thinking about a lot of things in life,what would you do if you really had only 6 months to live? Read my Bucket List here

In the last week of March we had our annual intra-college fest called Udbhav.

Ok I am repeating this again, but the experience of Udbhav shouldn’t be described in just a line :-) so will blog about it too SOON!

I am so tempted to quote this

“You will find time for things only that you really want to do! “

Adios

PS : I also signed up for Indiblogger this month and I love the experience of interacting with so many new people and checking out their writings too :-)