The Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU), the erstwhile BE College, Shibpur, is a venerable institution of higher learning in the country. Unfortunately, of late, it has frequently been in the news, for reason that had little to do with its glorious past of academic excellence. So, when after a large-ish gap, the students there tried to organise their techfest - Instruo ‘09 on 11 - 12 April, efforts were made to support their effort at the climb-back.
Prof Suryasarathi Barat, Director of the BESU’s School of IT (PDSIT), had requested me if I could help them scout for “big speakers”. I did know of one “big speaker” and therefore got in touch with Atul Chitnis (Toolz). With everything in place, suddenly there was the sad news of Toolz’s dad passing away and he having to rush to his mom’s side in Germany. With like 4 days to the Techfest, things could have gone into a tailspin, except that Toolz asked me to talk to Kishore Bhargava (BigBeard).
Kishore was available to speak on the 12th. He was also a great sport, as Kabir (his son) was going to give a recital later that evening which BigBeard didn’t want to miss. He landed up on 11th evening from Delhi. The next day (12th) we landed up around 11:00 AM. Kishore was already there. He’s talk was just before the lunch. Even though the awareness about FOSS in the student community was really low (when asked about having heard of FOSS, only 4 hands had gone up in a room with over 70 students). This is a bit strange as the professors keep insisting that they “have linux in all our labs“. There is some serious disconnect here.
Kishore’s talk was as always - lively. He drew in both the students and teachers, and made the session highly interactive. I tried to record his talk on my E71. The video is here, split up into 5 parts since youtube no longer allows for videos longer than 10 mins to be normally uploaded.
Part 1 of 5
Part 2 of 5
Part 3 of 5
Part 4 of 5
Part 5 of 5
Kishore’s presentation is here. It is under Creative Commons. BY-NC attribution. And if you use it somewhere please send nice “Thank You” to BigBeard
Kishore finished up with inviting students and faculty members to attend this year’s FOSS.IN at NIMHANS. He then took in a series of questions from both students and the professors. The “Top Ramen” guy (Gaurav) seemed to have a lot of questions. One of the resonating queries was “On Windows we have .NET / VC++ to program with, what do we use to do GUI programming on Linux, there are so many choices PyGTK, Qt, Glade and many more?”. Apparently “C-H-O-I-C-E” is something neither the students nor the teachers here are very comfortable with. There is a deep sense of unwillingness to leave aside the cacoon of “imagined comfort of the known“.
We all walked down for lunch at the BESU guest house. There we met with the new Vice Chancellor - Prof Ajoy K Ray. He was very open and has invited us back at BESU for future programs and activities. With a pragmatic view about things, and a willingness to listen to others, it seems that Prof Ray is trying to bring in a new drive and energy about the place. BESU needs it badly.
Responding to the call for support from IOTA (Institute for Open Technology and Applications), ILUG-CAL.ORG team members did a wonderful job of presenting the case of GNU/Linux and FOSS in general at the Kolkata International Bookfair between 28th Jan and 8th Feb 2009.
Here some of the photos from that event:
From L to R : Rohit, Gaurav, Susmit, Nishant, Mukesh, Shinjan, Sarbartha, Dipanjan, Hemant, Shivam, Debnath, Saikat and me (sitting)
I’ve been a off-and-on reader of Packt Publishing, choosing to go for their e-book format over the more expensive hard copy editions. Typically they would allow me to login into my account and download the PDF based e-book which would be password protected. Today I received an email from them, which I’m putting up here in part:
In December, we decided to enable the copy and paste feature on our eBooks. Following this announcement, we received a number of suggestions from customers who would like to see the password protection removed from our eBooks as well. With the increasing popularity of reading eBooks on portable devices, the password protection was proving to be an obstacle that prevented users from doing so.
Therefore, we have taken this feedback on board and decided to remove all password protection from our eBooks with immediate effect. If you own a Packt eBook, you can download it again from your account at www.PacktPub.com; this new copy will have no password protection. We would like to thank all customers who took the time to provide us with this feedback and we hope you are pleased with this outcome.
The move IMHO shares a lot of similarity to the recent Red Hat & Microsoft interoperability deal on virtualization. It seems that for the smarter players the demands from consumers are getting to shape DRM policies in publishing. Kudos to Packt! I’m definitely buying more from you
I had met Aveek Sen, 1st Year student from NIT Agartala during my keynote at Mukti ‘09 at NIT Durgapur. Since then he came down to visit me at my office. We spoke for some time, where I tried to share some ideas on what they could do at their college. Lack of bandwidth is the bane of their existence. He went back to Agartala and here is what he mailed to me on the progress so far.
I received a very good response in my college. I along with a batch mate Swapnil Paratey, seniors-Sushil Deshmukh, Nagendra, Sarfaraj & Rivu , are organising a seminar on Linux & FOSS on 24th February,2009.
We are also supposed to work on the database management system, website & online ticketing system of an auditorium in Agartala-Sukanta Academy.
As I mentioned earlier, I am planning to work on a nanotechnology experiments simulation software & require your help. Please get me in touch with some people as I would like guidance & certain experimental raw data from them.
Also, please let me know about the repositories in a disc. Sorry, I could not get in touch with Mr.Susmit Sanighrahi. He was unavailable on phone that day & after coming back to Agartala, I was a little occupied. I plan to contact him within the weekend.
I am on twitter now & have my blog on wordpress by the name Aveek Sen’s blog.
Just watched Jaijit from Sun announce the names of the winners from India at the Science City Auditorium. Bright kids all, and also from A-list premier english medium schools.
Nothing’s wrong with that, except they are hardly the kids that *really* need FOSS… I was also wanted to hear the total number of participants this year, but only got to hear the details on webserver logs.
It seems that Adda Bites near RGH has become a regular host for mini iLUG-Cal sessions from days of yore…. Susmit, me and the youngsters would soon be having something online… on the side notes, the next round of high school teachers training conducted by ILUG-Cal on behalf of IOTA will happen on 6 - 7th December.
A group of semi-literate (and *totally* computer illiterate) Group D (or Class IV i.e. the lowest grade of employees in governmental employment) staff at an University near Kolkata amusing themselves playing “The Potato Guy“. The pertinent fact is that they have never used Linux on the Desktop and here they are completely at ease with it!
Linux is supposed to be tough! Linux on the Desktop is “Orrey baba!” (a Bengali expression that basically says “Wow! that’s not my cup of tea!“)… yet all of my experiences from the last 6 years of working with people on the ground has been otherwise, this is the latest case in point. Almost all first-time users adapt to Linux pretty fast. It’s the so called “computer literate” that have problems galore.
For what it’s worth, it was their fifth day on a computer.
Their approach is very much in line with the overall ILUG-Cal’s core vision of helping set up a multitude of student FOSS groups and *mentoring* them so that there is faster and across-the-board uptake of FOSS in general and more active contributions and more Google SoC candidates.
That was 3 weeks back and the results are already coming in! They have formed the VNIT GNU/Linux User Group, so far it has 59 members and counting. They have also set up a local Fedora mirror (so that they do not need to depend on the college’s Internet connectivity at all times to stay updated).
We are expecting more exciting news from VNIT-Nagpur. Good job guys!
This is still in the planning, but the looks of it, we are soon going to get a chance to build our second clustered LTSP solution. Yesterday, I had some very interesting and involved discussions with Shwetav Agarwal who volunteers at The Future Foundation School for their ICT in education initiatives.
It looks as if we are going to design and deploy at 6-node (standard COTS hardware as opposed to our other clustered LTSP solution that we are deploying using HP’s c3000 Bladesystem) clustered LTSP that designed to scale up as well as scale out. The 6-node cluster would presently comprise of standard Pentium IV boxes with 2GB RAM each. The OS is likely to be Intrepid Ibex or Fedora 10. The idea is to run the a consolidated, full-fledged thin-client infrastructure that takes care of 100+ nodes.
I also had a nice round of discussion with Stephane Graber, the ltsp-cluster project is all set for v1.5 release in December 2008, and the PPA packages are all Ubuntu 8.10 ready.
