The site for the FLOSS meet is working now. We used plone for our site. I’m still learning how to customise this great and flexible Free Software tool to suit our need. [In their site thery have given some other sites that use plone check out this link http://plone.org/about/sites ]. Today I talked with Rajagopalan sir of CSI and he stresses the importance of helping teachers and students of schools which now has IT education as a subject. They are free to chose between Windows and GNU/Linux but most are choosing Windows and are complaing that they don’t know GNU/Linux and they need training. He told me about the plans to train the teachers to use the free OS. For NSS we are also going to stress on GNU/Linux part in our training programme.
Today I attended all the hours (I have been bunking the whole morning sessions for the last three days!). The sessonal is gonna start from Tuesday. Dilip has been working on the poster for the event.
That’s all for now
It seems there are some minor problems which makes the launching of our site for the floss day late. The server now hosts the site was server for our tathva technical festival and now some of the routers still identify the server as tathva only. So we’ve to find it and change it to glugc. Hope to have it online today. It available to the campus users now. Check http://glugc.nitc.ac.in/floss/index.html from cc.
FLOSS @ NIT Calicut [still we all use FOSS and FLOSS interchangable -- both same meaning;-)]
Yep, The key speakers for the event are finalised. They are
1. Atul Chitnis — Linux Consultant and chief organiser for Linux Bangalore 2004 http://www.linux-bangalore.org/2004/ . Also check his website http//www.atulchitnis.com/
2. Shanker Balan – Shanker Balan is a systems engineer with Yahoo! Bangalore. He is part
of the team which takes care of Yahoo! Mail related operations all over
the world.
3. Swaroop C H — Software engineer in Yahoo! , His ebook on Python has been downloaded more than 15,000 times .Check his website http://www.swaroopch.info and http://www.byteofpython.info
4. Pradeep Kumar — A main activist in the Gnome Bangalore group . Specilisation Sqlite.
http://www.btbytes.com
The morning session will be lead by Mr. Chitnis and his team on FOSS and its philosophy and business models …. No prior technical knowledge expected. And the evening session will be on Python programming, for programmers lead by Swaroop.
we have been discussing various dimensions of the upcoming floss meet in our college. we have been in the process of building a site and it is almost over. Today we finalised the organising committee which comprises of reperesentatives of our GLUG (me and dilip) then IEEE, CSE department, CSI parent chapter.
We were to start our teaching programme[by NSS] for It @ school today, but a confusion made it impossible and now we’ll have to start only after the first sessionals.
Yesterday we gave job treat to our classmates in Kadavu Resort Calicut. It was nice and every one enjoyed it and fed up with food! We ate so much so that we slept ‘bunking supper’. We were 37 ppl and we left college after morning claases by 12 and left there by 2.30. We went to Manjunath’s home where we spent after noon. Manju’s father narrated Tsunami experiences as their home is very near to see (Tsunami didn’t reach that far). There they got a gift from Bhagyaratham, Asianet and Manorama gift. They interviewed us and told it will be shown on Cable Vision (ACV) on Sunday. By 4 we left Manju’s home and reached back at 6. In the night I spent listening, converting and writing songs in Dilpu’s computer.
Today we had a NSS programme, it was a visit to an old age home run by missionaries of charity. We sung, danced and played with them. I hope we could give them a feeling that still there are some who care for them
or atleast we could lend our ears for them for about three hours. We had one guy called Thomas who read keyboard. Some of the inmates also sung with us. So two evenings of weekend over now. This monday we start NSS’s programme to teach teachers of the school near by.
Bye for now
Today after a long time I woke up at 7 and attended all 4 hours, thanks to Tojin’s advice to go to bed yesterday when I was thinking of coming to cc. Power system we had discussions about over voltage and lightning. She asked us to refer lightning. Then Economics was like always but today I sat in the first bench with Shankar. I guess I’ll be sitting there for some time, surely not for iDrives or iSysstems.
In NSS meeting we discussed about Tsunami relief and our possible involvement. Also we might have to postpone Garland to some other date because on 30th we have Campart, an intra year competition for cultuarl events by college union.
I’m trying to get Dilpu’s NVIDIA card working. Shyam also couldn’t get it done before with 2.6 kernel because debian dvd from pcquest does not comes with 2.6.8 source. So he now went with 2.4 kernel and he told us to try downloading 2.6 kernel.
Now Tojin is also started supporting Linux openly. It is a very good morale booster and it may help some others also to come up. We had heated argument as every day about Microsoft and Linux.
Tomorrow we are going for our job treat. Last time our class gave the biggest treat with ppl from all branches coming up.
Today I burned two cds of GNU win Nov 30 edition, which has windows versions of free softwares. It is intended as starting point to GNU/Linux migration.
Tojin and Dilpu had heated arguments as always. This time over Dilpu’s comment about Evolution in ANN class and the discussion there after. Dilpu wanted to discuss about Evolution and he told Tojin is not supporting evolution. [Tojin has been reading about evolution for a long time and he wanted me to download answersingenesis.org] Tojin didn’t say anything about it in the class (later he reasoned that he feared he might lose his sessionals had he objected Padma Kumari madam’s views). Barath had a stong view against evolution. He argued that ‘My father is not a monkey, nor my fathers’s father nor his and so on. There should be some point at which both co exist and still there are monkeys’. It seemed a strong argument. Later Shreeni pointed out that he believes in a hybrid theory where both can be included. I don’t believe that humans evolved from monkeys but I do agree that humans are subject to changes over a long time. But humans are evolved from humans only.
That’d be for today.
Today I woke by around 10 and attented ANN hour (Infact me and ksp[Kiran S Pillai] was first to reach the class, we used to keep same timings for class and sleep 
Now he has two bunks more than me 
he is at 23 and I’m just behind him by 21 but VR is way ahead with 34, but he was out of station for some days me and KSP were here all the days and manged this figure.
After the class me and KSK[Kiren SK] went to meet Jaikumar sir to discuss NSS programmes. He went to meet project guide and I went with Shankar, Tojin and MS to meet Suresh Kumar Sir [He is the best teacher our department has got and arguably one of the best in our college or even absolutely, and I have manged to write his two subjects two times ], our project guide. Diplu could not come because of a cycle accedent. He fell down from a cycle and it’s not serious but manged with some three or four wounds. We started with discussion of our project and we moved to various other topics. We discussed about books and softwares. He told he was convinced about the need of Free software and its importance. He was in doubt about the violation of law made every day. He pointed out the software piracy and its implications. We are trying hard to bring him to the Free Software community. He pledged his support for our efforts to spread the message of Software Freedom.
He discussed about the book reviews and his plan to write a book.
Then I mailed some Firefox tips to some of the free software groups. We are moving ahead with our palns for FOSS conference on Jan 29. Today we’ve Birthady treats of Karthik and Titto.
Bye then
Signing off
As part of NSS programmes this weekend we are visiting an old age home near Calicut. We completed sorting of the medicines, which we started yesterday. We were three final years two third years and two second years were there. After the camp we have got a direct link to the second year batch since we know each other personally. It was nice with all ‘paras’ to KSK and all. We will be spending an afternoon with them (members of Old age home). It is a real sad thing in the modern world, where everyone is busy and don’t have time for their parents and think their responsibility ends when they get admission for their parents in an old age home. We hope to give a new light to their lives by conveying the message of love. We will be having tea with them and we will present some programmes for them and basically we will interact with them.
In the after noon as usual lab done unprepared. I bunked 1-2 class and slept. Now I have 9 bunks out of 11 classes in iDrives! But I hope to compensate it with other subjects and lab. Lab has 100% and ANN only one bunk till now.
Evening was for sorting and after that I had supper from D mess (otherwise known as Tiger mess – Rajesh gave the name because they feed the members with chicken everyday as if tigers ). Arun Titto wanted to download graphics and printer drivers for his HP machine running XP. He downloaded it in nalanda and we had a bit of difficulty in finding out the computer in which he downloaded (Insted of downloading to his home drive (ie common to all computers in the network) he downloaded to the desktop of a computer and he didn’t know which one. So he downloaded it again and had to transfer it to CC to write. Initailly the staff told they don’t do ftp, but we manged). (Later it is known that it didn’t make much difference to the framing when he play games).
That’s all for now
Economics and Artificial Neural Network are the two subjects which I find interesting in the last semester. Economics both teachers are nice, one exeprienced and another novice. Today we had a lovely class and we discussed about Agricultural sector’s role in our economy. She said that all modern economies have only 20% agriculture and we have 70% and we should also cut it down to 20. But I couldn’t understand why agriculture is considered unproductive like jewellery. Still I cannot agree to her claims. I do agree that we should give more importance to the secondary and tertiary sector but in a country like ours were a large number of people depending on agricauture we should try to increase efficiancy and find out diverce fields and products in agriculture. IMHO we should stress on diversification rather than cutting down the agriculture’s role in our economy. After the class we, me Dilpu and Tojin discussed many things like cahnges in attitudes of people some 20 or 30 years before and now with an economic prospective. Now people want things just his neighbour or friend has it. So people take lots of money as loan and when they are not able to repay many resort to siucide. It is a nice subject and I like it.
Another thing happened today is fixing the dates of IT @ School and our (NSS) involvement in ‘teaching teachers’ of our near by school GVHSS Chathamangalam. We have decided to start our programme by next monday. So we have to prepare the schedule for it and make everyone involved work hard to make it effective and interesting. Our idea is to give confidence to the teachers so that they can effectively teach students with confidence which they lack now.
We cleaned the new NSS Room and made it ready for use. And we shifted our shelfs and other furnitures to our new room. Also other volunteers sorted the medicines which we collected for the medical camp. We are going to give these to the Old age home which we plan to visit this Saturday.
We installed Debian GNU/Linux in Dilpu’s computer and tried to copy the iso file in a folder but failed since the maximum file size was exceeded and it was splitted into two files. So we copied it to a folder and wow ! It is superb! Just select any package from the synaptic file manager and click apply, no more ‘Please enter cdrom 3′ to continues. Just changed the repositories by adding the directory and unchecking the cdrom.
Bye the way I bunked a iDrives (ie Industrial Drives) tutorial.
Time to go now.
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