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

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 :-)