That’s right — the VTU has done the one thing that will ensure that no student of theirs will ever learn a Microsoft-related technology — a ton of Microsoft software is now part of the official curriculum.

Thank you, VTU!

Aside …

Reminds me of the “Basic Computer Skills” Lab in 3rd semester, where we had to create a document in Word and a presentation in PowerPoint. The external examiner expected you to remember exactly under which menu each random feature lay. It took her about 10 minutes to figure out that I was searching through the menus blindly after every question. :)

Not to mention 5th semester, where our DBMS lecturer tried to strong-arm me into learning Visual Basic for a project on databases. This one I managed to hold out on, and did my work in PHP+MySQL.

The intimation about doing this was sent at 2357 hours today (yesterday, to be precise) to all. The notification basically stated that because of “undesirable activities”, Internet will, with immediate effect, be disabled from 0000 to 0600 every day. And that’s it — poof. The hostel network is disconnected from the rest of the Institute, thus making sure that nobody can access the Internet (or even the Institute’s own computing facilities). To compensate, the Computer Center (with a capacity of <200 computers) is to be kept open 24×7.

Of course, this was unacceptable, so a bunch of us decided that something needs to be done. There are 2 issues — the decision, and how it was implemented. While the decision itself needs discussion (more about this later), the implementation is of immediate concern. People were not prepared, and work on several people’s theses were affected. Plus, this has been done just a little after the end-semester exams, when most students are not on campus. This sort of fascism usually rears its head under precisely these circumstances. We decided that what needed to be addressed right now is the implementation — the Internet has to be made available this night.

A couple of our student representatives spoke to the Dean of Student Affairs (the DoSA — the official channel between the students and the administration). The DoSA basically said that they, the various Deans and the Director (and Deputy Director?) have made the decision at nothing would be done about it. More precisely, the Director, as the highest power in the Institute has taken the decision and that’s that. Further discussion may be taken up with him.

About 60-70 of us went to the Director’s house at about 2:30 (the entire process was peaceful — there was not shouting or slogans). We met with the security, who called the Head of the Computer Center (CC) and the DoSA to the place after some attempted dodging.

The CC Head turned up first and started asking what our problem was. He offered such resources as a vehicle to transfer us from hostel to CC as well as as many pen-drives as we require to transfer data from our machines to the CC machines. The DoSA just said that we’ve given you 2 years to think about whether this should be implementing it, and now we will be implementing it, so there.

Our student representatives (who did a pretty good job), after some dialogue, got the connection reinstated for tonight. They will be further taking up the issue later today.

The decision itself is extremely foolish, of course. Moreover, the dictatorial way in which this is being done is just as shocking. Let’s see how things pan out in time. Perhaps sense and sanity will prevail.

I just finished the Rahul Roy book (yes, 1 hour). It’s a short, illustrated, book. Very visual. I guess the intention is to analyse masculinity and its social roles and personal influences in a way that is accessible to people who don’t read much, or at least not much literature of this kind. Of course, the analysis is not very deep (I would have preferred more), but I think the experiment w.r.t. presentation style paid off. The book provides a reasonable amount of food for thought and pointers towards more works on the matter. Good stuff.

My second choice might make sense to some who know me. Being a Tamilian whose only real cultural predilection is coffee (something I do rue sometimes), I found both the title and the topic apt. The book is something of a cultural history of Tamil Nadu. Looks a little more heavy than I want to read right now, but will get to it soon. Happy purchase.

While the Book Café guys wrapping up, they decided that they’d give out a few free copies of Al Raines’ Soul Search Engine (signed!) and November Rain. grin

And the funny part is I went to the fair once, left without buying anything, thought “what the hell” and went back to actually buy the books, which is when this happened. Oh sweet indecision.

I know there’s something I’m forgetting, but maybe I’ll remember and make another post of it.

And late as they may be — the photos!

We started with Piyush continuing the KDE track, this time for developers. It was a good talk — the quick ‘n dirty PyQt demo was the icing on the cake. It really showed people how easy working on desktop apps can be.

We had a BoF session in the afternoon that rotated around Open Standards and Open Formats. We had about 20 people there, and after a 5-10 minute intro, we got around to a pretty interesting discussion. We started talking about whether open standards are really a “good thing”. The general consensus was that companies should be able to make money from their products, but vendor lock-in is bad. People agreed that the Adobe’s PDF model of keeping the format open and making money off the tools seems to work well. We then progressed to talk about how we can impact open format adoption. We settled on:

• Use open formats
• Accept only open formats in communication, to what extent is possible
• Get people to use open formats
  • Start with people who are willing to experiment and change
  • Then move to people who don’t care, and show them how open formats are better for them
  • Keep trying, no matter how bleak it looks
• Keep bugging companies that use closed formats to open them

The discussion was lively, and went all around the board — good fun.

Finally, Chaitanya Gupta of Cleartrip.com gave (actually, is giving) a talk on Common Lisp. People are sitting in there instead of standing in the queue to listen to Strings, so I’m guessing something is going right. Grin

Oh, and did I mention that we distributed 200+ Ubuntu/Kubuntu-KDE4/$distro_of_choice CDs just today?

So it’s been a fantastic four days. Neither the weather nor colds, sore throats, and $illnesses could get in the way. We had awesome speakers who came here against a whole bunch of odds (thanks Shreyas, Ankita and Piyush!)

Saurabh Nanda made it possible of course, to arrange the event at all.

And of course all the volunteers out here kicked butt. They tirelessly did stuff late into the night if it needed doing — designing and putting up posters, waking up early (or not sleeping) to get to the airport in the morning, and on and on.

A very special thanks goes out to Atul Chitnis — our event would’ve floundered somewhere right near the beginning. He guided, helped, prodded, pushed and made FOSSKriti what it is. And there’s Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Pradeepto Bhattacharya, and Runa Bhattacharjee who supported us from the moment we told them what we were planning to do. Thanks, guys!

So things are winding down, and I’m off to pass out in a ditch somewhere. :-)

[Rohit has to get photos up (put ’em up, dammit!), and I really really hope we can get videos of some of the events (update soon)]

We had some trouble starting up the machines, but our awesome participants stuck it out till we got things hammered out, with an amazingly patient dBera helping a lot. Things went on till 4 a.m. (at which point we needed to get just a little shut-eye (a few didn’t sleep at all) to prepare for the next day). At this point, we submitted a Firefox Beagle Search Bar written by Jai Kumar Singh (a.k.a. flukebox). In a day or two, another group should be able to submit a patch for a BibTeX filter. And there’s another project that I hope to talk more about in the days to come.

Yesterday (Friday) morning, we had Shreyas Srinivasan delivering a talk on building sexy UIs with Clutter. We had about 200 people in the hall, and it was a huge success. How do I know this? There were a lot of questions after the talk and they were almost all relevant and insightful. Afterwards, a bunch of people even got in touch with Shreyas about getting started on contributing. ‘Twas good!

Today started with Ankita Garg delivering a workshop on the Linux kernel. The lab was packed, and we had to turn away a huge number of people. A lot of the crowd was too new to Linux to appreciate what was happening, but some people took away what was intended.

This was followed by Piyush Verma’s talk on KDE4 for users. This went well — good turn out, and people learnt about KDE, asked good questions. He’s going to be talking about KDE 4 from a developer’s perspective. Looking forward to that. :-)

Next up was Ankita again, with a talk on LinuxChix. We had expected a large turnout but had about 13 women and 20 men. But the crowd was interested, and we had a good discussion after the talk covering the LinuxChix organisation, and how it can be useful in the context of the audience. Ankita’s got the list of stuff that came out of the discuss so I’ll link to it when it’s out.

Since we ticked off a whole bunch of IITK people by turning them away from the kernel workshop (we decided to keep only the non-IITKians). So Ankita very awesomely agreed to take another session. And we had a packed lab again. This time, the crowd was a lot more savvy, and things went better. If only we’d had more time, we could’ve had a longer session with more questions. But bravo to Ankita for talking for 6 hours today. Anyone who’s delivered even an hour-long talk will know what a feat that is.

As the finale for today, Saurabh Nanda and Chaitanya Gupta of Cleartrip.com are conducting a Ruby on Rails workshop, followed by a hackfest. We’ve got the CSE department’s largest classroom full of interested and engaged people, so we’re happy to go as late into the night as we need to. :-D

So that’s how FOSSKriti’s been going so far. Tomorrow’s the last day. It’s been legendary! (I told you so …)

[photos soon]

The workshops are on Ruby on Rails (a hackfest will follow the workshop) and Common Lisp. I was around when these guys were planning out the workshops, and their energy and passion when it comes to RoR and CL is incredibly contagious.

So not only are these guys making FOSSKriti possible, they’re helping us make it kick even more butt!

(p.s.: more info on the CL workshop and RoR hackfest will be out soon)

What’s more, we’re having a Beagle Hackfest too! We’ve collected a set of easy-to-attack tasks that have cropped up on the mailing list and IRC in recent times. It’s been a long time since I was around a Beagle/Dashboard hackfest. I still remember the first time I got all excited about this stuff, back in the day. :-)

The schedule’s out, with a couple of surprises still to be sprung. If you’re going to be dropping by, drop me a line here!

More updates soon …

That’s right. This year, IIT Kanpur’s techfest, Techkriti, is going to host FOSSKriti — our very own F/OSS mini-conference. We’re having talks, BoF sessions, workshops and maybe a hackfest or two. It is going to be legendary! More updates in the days to come.

Nirbheek and I are going to be trying to arrange a Dashboard/Beagle hackfest too. Let’s see how that goes. :-)

So if you’re coming to Techkriti, do drop in!

The talk was preceded by a short speech by Arun Shourie. He had the audience in fits, slamming politicians, and actually making the point that NRN was trying to make a lot better. That is some dude, that is.

Just finished The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood). Fame well-deserved. On to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (but hopefully not too soon).

Ignoring relative rankings, I scanned through for a list of colleges I recognised. There were a few of repute there, the Bangalore colleges I knew of, and some I knew of from people studying there. And the bottom line is that all the ones I know, in the words of Cartman, suck ass when it comes to education. And maybe that tells us a lot about the state of private education in India. That’s one I’ve sung before, so ‘nuff said.

What I wonder now is whether the next generation of adults is going to be the most cynical in recent history, or if we’re all going to delude ourselves into believing we actually learnt anything (and I don’t mean “lessons in life”) in college because it’s just easier that way.

And maybe it doesn’t even matter. Here, watch some Taylor Mali and feel good about it all.

Time I read Slaughterhouse 5. Currently on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Time, it is short, as the semester end nears.

And it appears that I will be busy this summer.

Not much else that is spectacularly worthy of reporting. Now to read about routing protocols in mobile, wireless, ad-hoc networks and associated security concerns.

Before that was the curious incident of the dog in the night-time (Mark Haddon — keeps reminding me of Haddon Mirk). I’m certainly lucking out in my choice of books — this too was amazing. Next in line, is The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)

Busy days here, filled with a lot of “nothing in particular”s. Coding work in earnest on thesis begins. Will also probably get to commission an HP NAS head, if I can figure out, and probably an EMC filer too. Fun!

Hope ya’ll had a happy Shutdown Day.

Won 3^rd prize in Chaos (it’s an event where you’re given some “obscure” language) and a set of problems to solve in a short while). The language was Snobol. Took me back to my BASIC days. :-)

Watched Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd.. Verrrry interesting movie. And quite funny to boot. A nu-age movie, as it were.

Last, but not least, obligatory YouTube link. A very nice song.

Not much book reading done. Lolita. Subject is horribly sick, writing is beyond words. And Nabokov rues the fact that it’s written in English, which isn’t his native language. Possibly reason enough to learn Russian. Prachett’s Carpet People is next, borrowed from Eloor. I’ve till tomorrow to finish it. Need to get hands on some Chuck Pahlaniuk. Our library’s got Fight Club, but it has been (temporarily) purloined by some daft child.

Went to Palakkad for a wedding. God’s own country. There was a strike going on this one day. Went to Malampuzha Dam, three of us on a motorcycle. Nice dam. Cops caught us on the way back. Got off the usual way. Next day, we’re leaving, Dad was haggling with porters. It was interesting to see these people. In most other places, people are openly greedy, openly corrupt, and make no bones about being this way. In Palakkad, though, there seemed to be some strang, skewed morality there. The cop insisted that “we don’t have this sort of thing in Kerala” (refering to bribery) with a whole lot of righteous indignation, before accepting the money (amidst continued protests of honesty, and insisting that a group of 3 people is a congregation). The porters started off with a ridiculous figure for transporting the luggage, but seemed offended when we suggested that this was so (he settled for a third of the original amount, so there is certainly a contradiction there). Maybe it’s just a different negotiation style there, or maybe the people are too proud to have outsiders suggest such atrocious things as “you’re greedy”.

Words of RHCP wisdom — “Staying high and dry’s more trouble than it’s worth”. Gurgaon, Kanpur … here I come. Superman’s Song. Nice.