I always feared this day would come, and it finally has. So with a heavy heart, I bid farewell to Sun Microsystems. Thanks to all those of you who made my one and a half years at Sun a wonderful experience. To wrap it up, all I’ve got to say is, “until we meet again!”
Neuron ’09, a technical fest, was held between 23rd and 24th of October, 2009 in my institute and I must say, those guys managed to pull it off pretty well! A once in a blue moon situation, most of the events violated the ‘Indian Standard Time’ rule by actually beginning and ending on time! When’s the last time you saw that happen here? Anyways, as always, we from the MNIT Open Source User Mesh (MOSUM) decided to conduct a little FOSS workshop during the three day programme. The 24th of October was the auspicious date as per the alignment of the planets (yeah right). So just like we did with all our other workshops that happened during our tech fests, we decided to bring in speakers from outside. Steven Fernandez (who works for Druvaa, and is also a former Red Hat employee) talked about the FOSS ecosystem, how it works and how one can be a part of it. Jai Pandya (JECRC, Jaipur) followed with a beginner oriented talk on WordPress and how to use it setup a website in under 5 minutes. Finally, I took over with a not-so-beginner-oriented talk on parallel programming using OpenMP (#pragma anyone?). Furthermore, the turnout of 120 was far more than any of us expected! Wonder if the city of Jaipur is really awakening. Let’s just hope that we see new faces turning up for our LUG-Jaipur meets from here on. 
So I’m back from Bangalore after a five day long trip. While most of it was spent at home playing with my five month old nephew, I did have some quality time hanging around as well. I got to Bangalore after a four and a half hour long flight from Jaipur, via Mumbai on Monday the 13th. Three days at home followed after which I finally decided to see daylight! I caught up with my CA friends Vasudha and Abhishek. We got lunch, did some shopping and took a trip to the office where I got a glimpse of the laptop I was supposed to get the next day. I also managed to meet Swathi, the cluster engineer who helped me with HA-Cron which finally landed me the grand prize.
We then proceeded to catch ‘The Hangover’ at Fun Cinema with Tirthankar, another cluster engineer. I kind of forgot when the last time was since I literally went LOL and ROTFL, watching a movie! Damn I just love ‘R’ rated comedies . Dinner and a trip to CCD followed, after we which we all got back home.
The next day, Saturday, was the moment I’d been waiting for. Yes, the CFF-2008 presentation ceremony! I’ll let the pictures do the talking here. And my new laptop totally kicks ass! I just can’t have enough of it. I’ll be giving Windows Vista it’s coup de grace tomorrow and I’ll be bringing in Debian Lenny and OpenSolaris instead. Anyways, final year has begun and I’ve got a whopping five guest faculties this semester, which pretty much equates to five subjects less for me this semester. Let’s see what I can make out of whatever little time I have left here in college. Adios for now!
The Sun Code For Freedom contest results are finally out and my pet project, HA-Cron, has been declared the first prize winner.
My old HP Compaq 6515b laptop had served me well for 2 years and now, it’s got zero battery life, no sound (it’s always been like that) and a touch-pad that goes crazy after 5 minutes of usage. Now, with the new Dell laptop I’ll be getting, I can actually setup a proper cluster! Good thing Open HA Cluster 2009.06 allows you to setup a cluster with just one NIC (cheers to Crossbow). Can’t wait to give this a spin!
Congratulations to all the other winners as well!
The Jaipur Linux Users Group (LUG-J) organised it’s second event, FOSJAM 2009, on the 16th and 17th of this month at JECRC, Jaipur. Being one of the proud members myself, I knew I just had to be a part of it! The event had a participation of around 280 students from a multitude of colleges in Jaipur. The event also featured talks by familiar names from the Indian FOSS community which included Vivek Khurana (no_mind), Shakthi Kannan (mbuf), Atul Jha (koolhead17) and Varad Gupta. Although it was decided that I’d give only one talk (on Open HA Cluster of course!), I ended up giving two. On the 17th, the event got a little delayed and hence, I decided to take up the task of keeping all the participants busy. So after gathering them all into a hall, I had a long and informal session on FOSS, why it is the best thing in the world for students, how to go about contributing and the whole idea of community driven contributions. The students were quite enthusiastic and I also ended up answering technical questions from all kinds of corners like MINIX versus Linux, using Makefiles, python, the quicksort algorithm and a lot lot more! The event then continued as per plan and I really enjoyed meeting more and more students. I was also surprised at the number of students who recognized me from the previous workshops I’d conducted including Helios and Fotia.
The Open HA Cluster talk started at 3:30 PM, and went on perfectly. I also got a good set of doubts from the students including what would happen if the cluster was partitioned such that there N/2 nodes in each partition (this was asked while I was explaining the split brain condition). There was another reasonably good doubt that I just can’t manage to recall right now. 
The event was quite an experience all in all, you can check out the pics over here. By the way, my college (Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur) is now the official host for all LUG-J meetings, the next of which will happen on the 26th of this month itself. Looking forward to meeting ya’ll again!
