SFW & WTF ...

Note: The following post is organized into five sections: Boring, Bad, Interesting, Personal, TechNotes. Pick the kind of news that you dig into most!

Boring Stuff:

Although the official date of my appointment as the Campus Ambassador in VIT for Sun Microsystems is August 1st, I officially was handed the reins from September 1st, and real work started off on September 8th, the day I returned from the Sun Induction & Training programme, Noida. The task at hand, the first order of business, was the "Software Freedom Day" that each CA had to organize in their respective colleges and universities and spread awareness about Open Source and impart knowledge etc.

Organizing large scale events at short notice is a rather dangerous thing to do, especially when you have an elephantine "bureaucrazy" ready to thwart every move of yours.

Bad Stuff:

We had a pretty bad false start in our Software Freedom Week where the administration decided to, without fore-warning, re-allocate the venue of our "Inauguration & Intro to Open Source" event to some Embedded Systems class, and we had thus move event to another timing. This was indeed frustrating and embarassing, but we explained the deal to the assembled audience and informed them of the revised schedule.

Interesting Stuff:

We had a great installfest today, and the revised Open Source introductory session. The folks turned up and were real innocent about Linux & Open Source, and we had a nice time explaining to them the difference between Open Source and Freeware, and so on. I probably did get a little emotional about Open Source at one point when a guy asked me, "Why do we need Linux when we have Windows which fulfils all our requirements". Imagine that. Any person reading this who doesn't see this question as absurd, is pretty seriously naive!

We also showed people "Big Buck Bunny", a short animated movie made using Blender, and was a great hit among people. The movie is absolutely hillarious!

Personal Blabberings:

Anyhow, this was Day 2 of the "Software Freedom Week" here at VIT University, and battling new catastrophic problems everyday and nearly ruining events and then miraculously managing to pull off a great show is something that is now something really really very familiar and all-in-a-day's-job occurance for me and my friends. Can't say I really enjoy this kind nerve-wrecking event management anymore -- am quite a veteran now, after 2 years at it; but I have better and newer plans for getting Open Source a greater reach among students out here, instead of just organizing Plain-Jane events like today's. This is the Participation Age, not the age for delivering sessions and telling people how and what to do. More about this unconventional idea in my next blog post!

Tech Notes:

On the other hand, my messing-arounds with my iPod hacks (here) has been getting more productive. I recently got some nice programs of mine running on Rockbox, and have decided I like iPodLinux once again! :-) Nothing wrong with Rockbox as such, but I feel that with iPodLinux having the comfortable "Linux structure", it makes more sense porting the nicer features of Rockbox to Podzilla and maybe in the process bring some things back to Rockbox as well. The other major interesting iPod-related thing is the in-depth reading-up I've been doing about the "Apple Accessory Protocol" (AAP), the set of commands iPods use to communicate and allow the world to control the iPod remotely through the Data Connection Port. This makes the critical part of my iPodMouse project pretty easy! :-)

Cheers!
Shashank