CA Blogs - English

Date: 2009/11/11

Location: 105, 1st Art Building, Fuzhou University.

Topic: Cloud Computing Introduction

Supported by Gao Ang, Campus Ambassador of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), we held a tech-talk about Grid Computing and Cloud Computing. Some postgraduate students and teachers, who researched this topic, attended this tech-talk.






Date: 2009/11/05

Location: 304, 2nd Art Building, Fuzhou University.

Topic: IT manpower and Sun certification

Agenda

19:00 - 20:00 Introduce IT manpower requirement

Speaker: Jianlong Wan, manager of Neusoft Company.

20:00 - 20:30 Introduce Java Programming and Sun Certification

Speaker: Tang Chenxing, Sun CA.

20:30 - 21:00 Q & A.




Date: 2009/10/26

Location: 2B207, Teaching Building, Minjiang College.

Topic: Java job prospect and Sun certification

Agenda

19:00 - 20:00 Introduce Java Base.

    Speaker: Mr Fu, a teacher from Fuzhou Top Federal Software Service Co.,Ltd

20:00 - 20:30 Introduce Sun Certification and SAI Resource

    Speaker: Tang Chenxing, Sun CA.

20:30 - 20:50 Introduce IT Job Prospect.

    Speaker: Wang Xiaoyun, the president of Fuzhou Top Federal Software Service Co.,Ltd 20:50 - 21:10 Q & A.

        Supported by Mathematics Department of Minjiang College, we successfully held a tech-talk about Java Base and Job Prospect, Sun Certification and SAI Resources.







Hello people

Today is my last day in Sun Microsystems and I would like to thank all that were following this blog. But, mainly Eduardo Lima, who was a great boss to me and to the others Campus Ambassadors.

My other blog will continue: http://joaosavio.wordpress.com

And my contact is joaosavio@gmail.com

Thank you very much!



It really feels nice that I am the leader of the LARGEST OSUM CLUB IN THE WORLD.

But to reach to this position I and my Team have worked relentlessly. I am really thankful to my Professor Chandra Bhushan Kumar and my team Avinash,Dinesh,Prabin,Rajkant,Raushan and others who have given in their best efforts to make JITM OSUM the largest.

I remember how we had to walk under the scorching sun from block to block and reach out to every single class room for campaigning. I still can remember one universal question : "WHY SHOULD I JOIN OSUM". Answering to this question and other queries was really amazing. My Team was ready to bring every student under "SUN"

 All the photos are uploaded at :

http://osum.sun.com/photo/albums/osum-registration-drive

 The Contributors:

  • Prof. Chandra Bhsuhan Kumar
  • Sampat Patnaik (thats Me ;) )
  • Avinash Das
  • Patanana Avinash
  • Kumar Raushan
  • Dinesh Gupta
  • Rajkant Raju
  • Dinesh Kumar Chowdhary
  • Prabin

On 18th November 2009 I will hold the OSUM and SAI introduction presentation with OSUM Leader Varundev Kashimath at TU Delft.

Everybody is welcomed to participate in this meeting and get more information on OSUM and SAI.

The event will be hold from 5:05PM to 6:05PM at Room A1.210 (1st Floor, Room A210) , Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TBM).

The address of TU Delft is:

TU Delft
Jaffalaan 5
Delft, Zuid Holland 2628 BX
Netherlands

Here is also the flyer and poster, which is used to promote this event (click on the pic to get the full PDF poster):

A full report of the event with pictures and number of attendees will follow after the event.

Ever had to add up the columns in a table with mixed KB, MB and GB quantities like this:

In Out Total
0.10KB 0.34KB 0.45KB
0.33MB 0.40MB 0.73MB
0.33KB 0.41KB 0.74KB
0.69GB 0.12GB 0.82GB

Using OpenOffice 2.4 or later you can use regular expressions and backreferences to convert the data in a table like this to a common unit and add them up. Click on "Find and Replace" and enter the following into the Search for field:

([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+).?MB.*

And in the Replace with field:

=SUM($1$2$30*1.024)

This will match a field like 1.32 MB and replace it with a KB value: 1351.68 You can do the same with GB values by replacing "MB" in the Search string with GB and also changing 1.024 to 1024. To get rid of the KB strings you can simply search for KB and replace it with an empty string. Now your table will consist only of numbers which you can conveniently add.

I remember just a few days back I was asked to design a program to remove duplicates from a file. Well the problem seems quite straight forward and simple to approach, but the real hidden question here lies in, how effective can anyone come up with an algorithm to solve this problem. Initially thinking on the tracks of using hashtables, maps, sets etc. I finally landed up designing a custom 'tree' implementation for getting almost the optimal solution which would remove duplicates from a file in a single iteration! (or in O(n) time, for my geek friends! )

Well while surfing internet, I later found that the tree concept I used to solve this problem is pretty much similar to a standard implementation called 'Suffix tree'. Here I am not going to explain you about suffix trees, you can find plenty of matter on this once you google it, rather, I would be explaining how my solution to this problem worked. Well, I don't claim it to be the most optimal implementation, I am sure, someone out there may come up with a solution better than mine. But this one solves the purpose just fine.

The logic here is to keep building the custom tree (which now we know is similar to suffix tree) as we go through the text. Here is the basic algorithm:

  1. Iterate through the text and do the following steps
    1. As the beginning of a new word is encountered, start matching it starting from the root node to its children, successively. along with buffering the current word as we proceed.
    2. if a match is found, try to match the next character in the word with its children
    3. If a match is not found, add another node representing the current character as a child to the current node.
      1. When the word ends, and the last character is matched, check its 'final' tag.
      2. if its true, it means the current word is the repeated one, so don't output the current buffer word
      3. if its false, it means the current word is encountered for the first time, so output the current buffer and flush the buffer.

Eg. let the text be "CAT CAN BAT". The tree for this sentence  will be -

    ROOT
     /\   
   C  B
   /     \
  A     A
 /  \       \
T* N*   T*

Note: the (*) mark represents the final state.

Here goes my C/C++ implementation: 

Here is the final code to download


Today I was attending the Open Dag with a stand to inform our students about OSUM and SAI. I distributed OpenSolaris CDs, data sheets, pens and a lot more.


Fontys Venlo OSUM group stand in the IT faculty at Open Dag 7th November 2009

More than 50 people visited the stand and the Fontys Venlo OSUM group got 19% more members and we only need 7 people more to break the 100-member-wall.


"Register here for OSUM" - The registration computer at the OSUM stand, which has been used by 17 students to get registered at the OSUM portal.

The highlight of this event was a drawing, which has been attended by more than 50 people. The prizes were two 16GB Kingston USB storage drives and a 15 Euro iTunes card for buying apps and music. The winners are:

1. Tim Verhaegh (USB storage drive)
2. Ferd van Odenhoven (USB storage drive)
3. Michael Klingen (iTunes card)


The winner of the drawing: (from left) Michael Klingen, Fern van Odenhove - Tim Verhaegh is not shown on the photo

Congratulationsto the winner.

In my eyes this event was a great success and I really hope that some more people I invited at the Open Dag event will accept the invitation to OSUM to get 100 members in Fontys Venlo OSUM group.

Here is a strange problem encountered by me while experimenting with Java. Have a look at the following code sample:
interface test {

    void fun();
}

public class Test implements test {

    public void fun() {
        System.out.println("Test.fun() called");
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Test().fun();
    }
}

Can you find any problem with the above code sample? Well there really isn't any problem with the above code. Still when you try to run this on Windows systems the execution fails for Test class ( i.e. >java Test) throwing exceptions like:-

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: test (wrong name: Test) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:276) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:276)

Exception in thread "main" Exception in thread "main" Java Result: 1

And adding to the surprise, this program runs absolutely fine on Linux and other Unix based systems! Ok so lets try to dissect the program and figure out what the problem is with this. Here is the possible explaination which I came up with. Observing it a little carefully you can observe that the name of the interface is 'test' and class is 'Test' this makes them differ only in case. But what difference does it make to us? java is of course case sensitive, so we are free to chose names like that! Well the answer is that, although java is case sensitive the underlying OS ( Windows) is not. Therefore the compiler (even though it wanted) couldn't create two separate .class files (one for interface, and other for the implementing class), because the other class file over-writes the previous one. In short, this problem arises because after compiling the above code, two class files: test.class and Test.class map only to a single file on windows, not two unlike the unix systems. So be careful while getting trapped in such of hard-to-find bugs!

As a part of our Mobile Computing curriculum, we had case studies on several mobile Operating Systems like the Symbian Operating System, Windows CE and the Palm Operating System.

Our faculty encouraged us to explore these topics and present them to our other class-mates so that we get a lot more exposure to the subject.

Thrilled by the fact that the Symbian Operating System is an open-source mobile Operating System, I decided to take up the topic. I put a little effort into understanding the Symbian Operating System. It was exciting to find out my phone (Nokia N73) had the Symbian Operating system and I took an opportunity to tweak around with it.

I also planned a few live demos emphasizing application development on the Symbian Operating System with the help of programming languages like Java and Symbian C++.

With the support from the faculty of my college, a session covering the Symbian Operating System, along with J2ME development on it was presented on 27th October.

The presentation covered the following topics –

  • Introduction to Symbian Operating System
  • A Brief History of Symbian Operating System
  • Symbian Foundation
  • Features of Symbian Operating System
  • Operating System Architecture
  • Memory Management
  • Threading and Security
  • Application Development In Symbian OS

The presentation was followed by two live demos covering –

  • Symbian C++
  • Java 2 Micro Edition

The session concluded with a quick comparison of Symbian C++ and Java ME and how an application can leverage the benefits of the languages when developing an application.

As the target audience for the presentation was primarily the final year students, we had around 40 students participating in the presentation.

At the end we provided a link to the NetBeans website to encourage them to download the latest version of NetBeans along with the mobility pack so that they can go deeper into developing J2ME mobile applications.

Check out the photos at –

http://picasaweb.google.com/osum.source/SymbianOperatingSystem#

Recently the faculty of my college along with the support of the students organized a Linux workshop. The workshop focused on the basics of the Linux operating system. The workshop was held for two consecutive days in which the students learnt a lot about the fundamentals of Linux.

The workshop was organized on 23rd and 24th October.

The workshop was conducted by Mr. Ahmad Jabas, a PhD scholar of our college. He emphasized various concepts of Linux with the help of the Debian Operating System.

Virtualization was also covered as a part of the workshop with the help of VirtualBox. There was a live demonstration where the Debian Operating System was installed on VirtualBox.

Here is a quick overview of the various activities that were covered in the two days –

Day 1

Topics covered –

  • Introduction to Linux
  • Origin of the Linux Operating System
  • History of the Linux Operating System
  • The GNU Project and Source Code Freedom
  • Linux Philosophy
  • Linux Installation
  • A comparison of the Linux Operating System and the Windows Operating System
  • UNIX/Linux commands

Day 2

Topics covered –

  • Virtualization
  • Virtual Machines
  • System Virtual Machines
  • Process Virtual Machines
  • Full Virtualization
  • Applications of VMs
  • VirtualBox
  • Linux Installation on VirtualBox
  • Shell Scripting

Various demonstrations were given which included several concepts like –

  • Stand-alone installation of Debian
  • VirtualBox installation of Debian
  • Linux commands
  • Shell Scripting

The workshop was very inspirational and several attendees installed the Linux Operating System on their computers and started working with it.

There were about 65 students who attended the workshop both the days.

I recently gave a presentation on “Oracle Forms” – a feature of the Oracle developer suite which helps GUI designers to quickly design screens to facilitate easy insertion, deletion, update and query of tables in a database.

The third years were asked to learn about Oracle forms for their final examination. I decided to take this opportunity to talk about it.

Oracle Forms runs on Java containers and the GUI is presented in the form of Java applets to the user. The Java container is known as “Oracle Container for Java (OC4J)” in the Oracle Forms architecture.

The presentation was given on 21st October which was followed by a live demo which emphasized how an Oracle form is created and how is it run with the help of Java containers.

The presentation covered the following topics –

  • Introduction to Oracle Forms
  • Oracle Forms Architecture
  • Single Block Forms
  • Master Detail Forms
  • List Of Values
  • Non-base table fields
  • Triggers
  • Troubleshooting

The presentation was followed by live demos covering –

  • Single Block Forms
  • Master Detail Forms
  • List Of Values

The session concluded with emphasize on technologies like JSPs, Servlets, JDBC, etc. which are swiftly replacing Oracle Forms because of their customizability.

As the target audience for the presentation was primarily the third year students, we had around 40 students participating in the presentation.

Check out the photos at –

http://picasaweb.google.com/osum.source/OracleForms#

Date: 2009/10/18
Location:  Third-Region Square,Fuzhou University Student Apartment.
Topic: FZUOSUM Recuitment
Agenda
09:00 -16:30 Introduce FZUOSUM and Sun's technology, break from 12:30-14:00.
Tang Chenxing, Sun CA.
Huang Zhiliang, Leader of FZU Computer Science Association.
Zhong Sisi, FZUOSUM leader.
Other Open Source enthusiasts.

Supported by Computer Science Association of Fuzhou University, we held the event about recruiting freshmen and consultation, and the promotion of our OSUM Community and Sun's technology of Java, OpenSolaris, Netbeans, SunSpot, etc..

After this event, about 50 freshmen joined FZUOSUM (http://osum.sun.com/group/FZUOSUM)

Today I got my CA Recognition for Q1. This means that I'm the Campus Ambassador of the quarter one in the FY2010 for the whole continent of Europe.

The official statement from my Manager was:

I would like to recognize Clemens Schulz for his outstanding results promoting OSUM at Netherlands's Universities. He successfully recruited and supports OSUM leader at the Technical University of Delft - the biggest tech university in the country. In addtion to this, he is working with 3 other universities. His enthusiasm and self-confidence in performing his CA role (and specially demonstrated on meetings with professors) will definitely bring us great success.

I also want to think everybody, who made this possible! I really hope to get this nice award in the next quarter again and I will try to do my best!

Thanks!

Hello, everyone.

Some great news: Sun Tech Days 2009-2010 in Brazil is coming! It's going to be held in Sao Paulo from December 8th to December 9th. Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris and/or NetBeans developers cannot miss this.

There is going to be talks on Java, JavaFX, Glassfish, OpenSolaris (DTrace) and a lot others!

The full agenda can be seen here.

This year's special guest is going to be with the Java programming language creator, James Gosling.


The official website is Sun Tech Days (in Portuguese).


Check it out!

Today I got the permission to organize a new OSUM event at 'Open Dag' on 7th November at Fontys Venlo campus.

The last Open Dag was a great success and this time I will enter the event with even more specials like a drawing, a lot of nice information materials and give aways!

You will find more details on the Open Dag 2009/11 after the 7th November here.

For everybody who wants to join me:
Come visit the OSUM stand in front of room W1 1.87 at Fontys Venlo campus. From 10:00 to 14:30.

Since 22th October one of my OSUM blog entries is linked to the homepage of Sun Developer Network (http://developers.sun.com).

This is a test, which should show how good your open source software knowledge is. If you know the answer of the question, please reply directly at the OSUM group portal.

The entries on SDN will change every week, so I made a screenshot of it, if it isn't still available to you. Check this out:

Thanks to everybody who made this possible and I really hope to get another nice entry in the list of SDN experts!

Nesta palestra online serão mostradas as principais características do novo NetBeans 6.7 e serão mostrados alguns exemplos nesta moderna IDE!!!

Dia: terça-feira, dia 27 de Outubro
Horarios Brasil:
3:00 PM - Sudeste, Sul, GO
2:00 PM - Nordeste, PA, MT, MS, AP
1:00 PM - Norte

Horários Europa
6:00 PM - Lisboa

Horários África
5:00 PM - Cabo Verde
7:00 PM - Angola
8:00 PM - Moçambique

Para entrar na palestra, devem apenas clicar no link:
https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2007072&password=M.9DCBF134254AF63B4280FAD46A916C

NetBeans é uma IDE gratuita, Open Source, que permite aos desenvolvedores criar aplicações desktop, web, enterprise e mobile de uma maneira rápida e fácil usando a plataforma Java, assim como JavaFX, PHP, JavaScript e Ajax, Ruby e Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails, C/C++.

Este webinar será conduzido por João Sávio Ceregatti Longo, Campus Ambassador da Universidade Estadual Paulista, campus Rio Claro, Brasil

Não se esqueçam de entrar 15 minutos antes para testar o som e a conectividade à rede.
Student selected for JavaOne 2009 at San Francisco

Avinash Joshi, a final-year B Tech student of Information Technology at the Amritapuri Campus, was chosen as the only student from India to attend the JavaOne 2009 Developer Conference in San Francisco, completely sponsored by Sun Microsystems.


Avinash (second from left), at JavaOne 2009.

See his blog entry on this.

School OS for NCERT

School OS is specially designed for school children by Shyam and Avinash (final year IT student), while interning with SUN, in collaboration with NCERT and IIT Delhi. The School OS is determined to spearhead the rise of open-source in the primary & secondary education system of India. The project was based at Sun Microsystems, Delhi office. They also went to the schools to install and test the operating system.

 

Contribution to Android - ADC2, 2009

Three students from 2nd year Computer Science, Rahul, Shilpa and Seshagiri, participated in the Android Developer Challenge 2(ADC2). They had made a game of "Tic Tac Toe" that runs on the Android platform. This is now an OpenSource project hosted at google code.
See the blog entry here.

 

Application porting to Open Solaris

Varun Rao and Adithya, 3rd year Computer Science Engg. students, made contributions to Open Solaris by porting applications. They worked on porting applications like "Parcellite", which is a clip board manager for Open Solaris.
See his blog entry on this.

 

 

First Non Sun employee to contribute to Open HA Cluster

Abhilash, a finaly year student of Computer Science Engg., contributed to a bug fix on Open HA Cluster by someone not employed by Sun!

 

GlassFish Examples and documentation

Archana N, a final year student of Computer Science Engg., made contributions to the Java EE/GlassFish documentation on how to secure the existing EJB converter example from the Java EE tutorial using mutual authentication. It will be included in an upcoming release of the Java EE tutorial.

 

The Sun's Code For Freedom Contest (2007)

Students of Amrita started contributing to opensource with the Code For Freedom 2007 contest organized by Sun Microsystems.

Amrita was conferred the ‘Champion University’ status contributing to 105 bug fixes and enhancements to Opensolaris, Apache Derby and Open Portal.

Ever since students have contributed to documentation projects enhancements and bug fixes.

 

IBM TGMC 2007

Our students won the IBM Great minds challenge (TGMC '07)using open source tools like eclipse and java. Abhilash, Sandeep, Deepthi and Vidya were part of the team that came 5th in TGMC '07.

I gave a demo on creating a simple Desktop Application using NetBeans on Tuesday,October 21st,2008.

Unfortunately on Tuesday morning , we had heavy rain and holiday was declared all of a sudden. So students thought that the session might have been cancelled.  So I made calls to my friends and I let them know that it was not . Many of them couldn't make it. But still some showed up. And the demo was completed inspite of the rain. 

The best part here is those who dint attend felt very bad that they couldn't attend it. And those who atteneded were very happy abt it. Since we presented a simple demo they found it easy to follow and they told they are looking forward to attend many such sessions. Thus our first demonstration of Netbeans application was a success inspite of rain.

Sun announced the benchmarks for its new flash array system.

Key thing is, it out performed mechanical hard drives with all the benifits that come with using solid state drives such as low power consumption, mechanical shocks tollerance and ease of deployment. You can find all the technical details explained way better than I can explain it in this video.

For further information check this here
Today was refreshing day when we had an interesting conversation with fellow CAs from all over India and our coordinators. We talked about various things and one thing was to take OSUM beyond boundaries that existed. I was so inspired by that and am planning to give my best to this effort by visiting lots of schools and colleges and enlightening, empowering them by letting them know about OSUM and how it can change our world. Looking ahead eagerly to a hectic OSUM-filled time! :-)


Here is My GNOME(OpenSolaris 2009.06) Desktop's screenshot, to prove that theres nothing now which cannot be achieved in the world of Open-source. It now is no more limited to the community of computer geeks, but its increasingly becoming extremely user friendly proving it much suitable for the beginners as well. The time is gone when one needed to type long and cryptic commands in order to do anything they want on Linux & Unix systems. Though the command line alternatives are always there, leaving an entire world for the user to explore and learn! Everything is now offered in much more interactive and highly customizable GUI.


Thats the beauty of open-source- it can give you exactly what you want. Open-source products including Linux and OpenSolaris opens itself to change by anyone who uses it thereby giving the freedom and power to users. There are multiple Window Managers available for using with it. The most commonly used are -GNOME and KDE which generally comes integrated with most of the linux distributions as well.

Lets begin with our familiarisation with GNOME, OpenSolaris 2009.06 Desktop ( but this might help you in other linux distros as well)
It displays a menu bar at the top containing menus for Application, Places and System on the left side of the bar along with the tray icons of the processes and a calendar, sound control and the Username being on the right side of the bar.
And a status bar at the bottom of the screen with the icon to Show the empty desktop minimizing all the currently opened windows, tabs of all the currently opened windows, a Desktop Switcher showing the available desktops and finally a Trash (where the deleted files reside giving option to restore back the accidently deleted files, until manually cleaned).

  • Application Menu: It contains Set of the applications installed and currently configured to be displayed in the menu format in different categories. It comes packed with a range of open-source applications preinstalled, like firefox for web browsing, Mozilla Thunderbird as the email client, Pidgin as the chatting messenger, Totem and Rythmbox for audio/video playing, many Image editing and viewing tools and a set of GNOME games!
  • Places Menu: It presents links to some of the predefined locations so as to reach there quickly.
  • System Menu: It presents the system specific tasks and configurations

Application and System menu can be manually altered by right clicking-> Edit Menu option.

Any system related information about the running processes or the present system memory and network usage etc. can be found anytime in Applications->System Tools->Performance Monitor.

Opensolaris presents with an exhaustive list of open-source software for anyone to download from anywhere in the world from its central repository using IPS (Image Packaging System) . This can be done in either of the following ways:
  • System->Administration->Package Manager
  • using command line utilities like apt-get :
    • pfexec pkg install <package_to_install>

Some of the other Free utilities in which you would be interested to install are:
  • Opera (a web browser)
  • Netbeans IDE ( for programming in JavaSE, JavaME, JavaEE, C, C++, Javascript etc )
  • openssh ( for enabling remote login into the machine)
  • Evolution Mail ( another email client like Evolution)
  • Avant Window Navigator ( enables a cool looking, highly customizable docking feature much like MAC )
  • GVIM text editor ( a GUI based vim  text editor, for the people who are addicted to the cool and simple, our beloved VIM ! )
  • GIMP the Image Manipulation Program

More to cover in subsequent posts.
Happy Open-Source!


Apple's White Macbook from Apple

After a long, grueling and painstakingly configurations with my Windows XP Guest on VMWare, I’ve decided to use BootCamp instead. This is very untimely for me as I only have less than a day to configure my laptop and I have a thesis presentation in 2 days.

Yes, I am very much aware that I am cramming but if I don’t reformat now, I might be able to say goodbye to my thesis for real.
I have to take this risk. For thesis’s sake. *gulps*

Hello people! Some photos of Software Freedom Day in Rio Claro/SP - Brazil!

Thanks!

This year, as a part of the Software Freedom celebrations, we hosted a few competitions and gave a few informative presentations. Here is a quick overview of them –

Essay Writing Competition

The competition was primarily to encourage participants to explore various Open Source topics – technical and non-technical, and come up with innovative articles. We had a huge response for this and had a tough time selecting the best entries. We had various topics covering different perspectives of the Open Source world. Below are a few of the articles which were really good –

Open Source – The article covered the basic philosophy of Open Source and gave an insight about the economic perspective of OSS. It also emphasized the innovation which drives Open Source products.

VirtualBox – The article covered the salient features of the VirtualBox OSE. It gave a bird’s-eye view of VirtualBox, with a focus on the technical strongholds of the virtualization package. It also briefly described the advancements planned in the development of VirtualBox.

Open Source in the Cloud – This article merged the philosophy of Open Source with the innovative paradigm of Cloud Computing. It gave an overview of what Cloud Computing is and highlighted the contribution of Sun Microsystems Inc. to the cloud.

Google Chrome – The article was primarily about the Open Source web browser from Google, Chrome. It focused on the prominent features of the browser and gave a description of features like speed, stability, security, etc.

Top Ten Linux Distributions – The article was mainly a mash-up of the Operating Systems built on the Linux kernel. The author reviewed various Linux in the article. Several flavors like Debian, Slackware, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Gentoo, LinuxMint, PCLinuxOS and the CentOS were covered in this.

Open Source Quiz

This was one of the most exciting events of Software Freedom Day this year. We wanted more participation of the audience this year, so as to achieve this and bring up the spirit of Open Source in the audience; we planned an Open Source Quiz.

To accommodate the entire audience, the quiz was conducted in two stages – there was a preliminary round which had a questionnaire of around 20 questions. Almost everybody in the audience was interested in the quiz and came forward for the prelims. After the prelims, the top 6 teams were invited for the final round. The round had an oral questionnaire and consisted of around 6 sub-rounds.

Finally at the end of the final sub-round the highest and second-highest scorers were declared the winners. There was a neck-to-neck competition between the teams till the end and had the pulse of the crowd running.

Overall, the quiz was the show-stopper of the day. Hats off to the quiz-masters! – Miss. Devika and Mr. Roopak Bhartee.

Software Freedom Day and Open Source

In order to convey the philosophy of Open Source and the importance of Software Freedom Day to the audience, Mr. Vishwak gave a presentation titled “Software Freedom Day and Open Source”.

The presentation emphasized on various concepts like –

  • What is Open Source?
  • Free Software
  • Why the move to Open Source?
  • Perception and participation
  • Software Freedom Day
  • Contribution of Sun Microsystems Inc. to the Open Source world
  • Sun’s Open Source strategy
  • Overview of the Open Source technologies of Sun
  • The session was very informative and the audience had a through insight about the OSS world.

Sun Academic Initiative

To help the audience realize the importance of certifications and inform them of the wonderful discounts available on various Sun certifications, Mr. Laxman took up a presentation on “Sun Academic Initiative”.

The presentation focused on various topics like –

  • Introduction to SAI
  • Benefits of certifications
  • The Java certification hierarchy
  • The Solaris certification hierarchy
  • The MySQL certification hierarchy
  • Various certifications available as a part of SAI
  • Registration process at SAI
  • A step-by-step explanation of how to purchase a voucher and avail the huge discounts.

The session was inspiring and there were several students who were keen on taking up a certification exam. The various tutorials and the learning programs of SAI were highlighted which created a confidence in the interested students to pursue the certification.

On a whole, Software Freedom Day 2009 was a huge success wherein the participants and the organizers enjoyed and learnt a lot.

Photos uploaded at –

http://picasaweb.google.com/osum.source

Presentations uploaded at –

http://osum.sun.com/group/osmaniauniversityosumsource

It is finally September and Software Freedom Day is here. This is one day when every Open Source enthusiast feels proud of being one. If you haven’t heard about Software Freedom Day, here is what SFD is all about –

“Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software. It is a public education effort to celebrate the virtues of FOSS and to encourage its use. It is celebrated on the third Saturday of every September.”

Open Source has spread its wings all over the world and Sun Microsystems Inc. being one of the biggest supporters of the Open Source community encouraged many OSUM leaders and Sun Campus Ambassadors to celebrate Software Freedom Day in a grand way.

Osmania University, being a huge supporter of FOSS, wasn’t behind in the grandeur of SFD. We decided on celebrate Software Freedom Day on the third Saturday itself, which was on September 19th.

Due to the recent unforeseen holidays which were declared in our city, there were speculations that 19th might be a working day as a compensation for them. Because of this, our preparations came to a stand-still and we had to wait for a formal announcement. We didn’t get any reliable information till Friday and because of this we had only a day for the publicity in our college. As a lateral consequence of this speculation, we didn’t even get an opportunity to invite other colleges to the event. :(

Well as people say “Things must go on!” and things did go on. Despite these bottlenecks, we had a reasonable crowd of 55 to 60 open source enthusiasts for the event. It was really soothing to see such participation amidst the tailback. The crowd comprised of students from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th years. We weren’t given permission to invite the 1st year students due to security concerns from the college.

I was sure that the students of my college were bored of hearing my presentations by this time, so for a change, I requested a few of my friends to take up the co-ordination of the competitions and presentations. They immediately agreed and showed a lot of interest.

The celebrations of SFD began with a motivating speech by our HOD, Prof. Lakshmi Rajamani. She spoke on Open Source Software and emphasized the support being provided by our college to the OSS world. She gave a brief introduction on SFD and how Osmania University was a part of it over the years.

There were many activities that were held at our campus as a part of SFD. Several competitions were held to motivate the students towards SFD. We had an “Essay writing competition” where the participants were asked to explore various Open Source topics – technical and non-technical and come up with an innovative article. There was an “Open Source Quiz” organized by Mr. Roopak Bhartee and Miss. Devika. A presentation emphasizing the merits and benefits of FOSS was given by Mr. Vishwak. There was a presentation on the “Sun Academic Initiative” by Mr. Laxman. To know more about these events, check out the “SFD 2009 – Competitions & Presentations” blog-post.

The event was concluded by a “Vote of thanks” by me. The entire event was well anchored by Miss. Pravallika.

On a whole, the event was a huge success and there was a lot of enthusiastic response from the participants. The entire S.O.U.R.C.E group was delighted and enthused by the participation of the crowd for the event.

Photos uploaded at –

http://picasaweb.google.com/osum.source

Presentations uploaded at –

http://osum.sun.com/group/osmaniauniversityosumsource

Time: 2009.09.27 15:00-17:15
Place: Report Room, 7th Building, Computer Science College, Fuzhou University.
Agenda
15:00 – 16:00, Introduce J2EE and Sun Certification, Li Jian (Sun Java Principal Lecturer of Greater China)
16:00 - 16:30, Introduce SAI and its benefit, Tang Chenxing (Sun CA)
16:30 – 16:45, Professional Career Planning, Yan Zhiwei, (Sun General Agent of Fujian Prov.)
16:45 - 17:15 Q/A

Yesterday I celebrated the Software Freedom Day at Fontys Hogeschool Venlo. I opened a stand in front of room 1.87 in building W1. More than 50 people (57) entered the drawing and even more informed their self about free and open source software. The main focus was on OpenSolaris. Many OpenSolaris DVDs and SoftwarePacks has been distributed!

Here are also the winner of the drawing:

 SCJP Book        Nico Themanns
2GB USB-Dongle        Pieter van den Hombergh
2GB USB-Dongle        Georg Fleischer
OpenSolaris T-Shirt    Patrick Stevens
Sun Microsystems Cap    Abdullah Simsek
OpenSolaris Bag        Michael Klingen
OpenSolaris Bag        Christian Knutz
OpenSolaris Bag        Simon Woker
OpenSolaris Bag        Pascal Ursprung
OpenSolaris Bag        Stephan Melzer
OpenSolaris Bag        Yuriy Solovyov
OpenSolaris Bag        Markus Krause
OpenSolaris Bag        Stefan Arians
OpenSolaris Bag        Simon Engbers
OpenSolaris Bag        Christian König

At the stand I also arranged a computer, where students could register their self at the OSUM portal. With this computer I also got 16 new students for my OSUM group. Especially first and seventh semester students.

I also used this event to promote other planned events at Fontys Venlo. Many students are interested in the planned certification event. I also talked to the university staff about this to push the planning forward.

Many students also talked to me about more social events I should plan. So in the next weeks I will try to plan some more social events.

I really thank everybody for helping me at this event and thanks to all the students, who attended this event! It was a really great time!