Software Freedom Week 08 - Phew!

Note: This is a blog post I'd written in a state of half-sleep at 3:38 AM, 27th September, 2008. I slept off before managing to send it and forgot all about it, so here it is. :-)

Sitting at 3:38 AM, while browsing the Internet for some interesting articles, I found I had received a new mail. Looking into my Inbox, I discovered that the mail had been entered into my "Friend Networks" label, and it turned out to be an insistent invite (he had sent it thrice) from a friend in a social networking site, and the invite reads: "You have been invited by ____ to join the community: I LOVE FRUITS". Need I ask, "Huh?"

This was meant to be a blog on the "Software Freedom Week", which more or less got concluded today. Technically, it finishes tomorrow, but the only event we're having tomorrow is the passive collection of Abstracts for the Product Engineering contest and a party! So no crazy real-world events that require fighting with the "bureaucrazy" and stuff. The last one week has been a very hectic period, which reminded me of the days of our "IEEE Resonance", the two-day National Level Technical Fest, held in March earlier this year. That event was gigantic and I, as one of the 3 main organizers, probably lost several years of my lifespan due to the stress and workload that went into organizing that event.

This Software Freedom Week was organized together in a VERY short span of time. Really. It sets a sort of personal record, as the only Large Scale event I've organized within a span of 9 days. The other large events have me and the core team starting work atleast 3 months in advance. The entire idea that we Sun Campus Ambassadors have to organize a Software Freedom Day in our colleges by 27th September became clear only once we had done our Induction & Training programme at Noida from 5th - 8th September.

Our SFW went off pretty well! We managed to conduct several successful installfests, and installed and distributed openSolaris DVDs to atleast 30 folks! The other guys installed some distributions of Linux, like Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE. Then our Linux & Unix demos were quite successful with a lot of interested people turning up who managed to get an intro to the basics of the file structure and philosophy of the Unix operating system, as well as some common tools and commands. Our Programming challenge paper was very well appreciated by all the students as being "damn interesting to solve". The biggest success was the "Mobile Application development using NetBeans" workshop which I conducted yesterday evening (26th). The turnout was HUGE and the guys were amazed at the ease of developing MIDlet apps using the Visual Editor. There was a pretty strong request for conducting an advanced session for them soon as they wanted to learn more about this. :-) And just to recall that I myself had been trained at this for the first time 3 weeks ago in Noida!

Organizing large events at a very short notice leads to nightmarish organizational problems, and can easily spin out of control to lead to horrible mis-management and utter chaos. We came close to it during the hiccup that happened on the first day with the venue conflict with another department's research class, and it took us a great effort to continue with full speed throughout the week inspite of the regular, minor-but-painful hiccups that occured. We always managed to solve them somehow, but the fact that they appeared shows that a lot more work could have gone into the planning process. Yet, I do not regret anything, and even though I am so totally physically and mentally exhausted, I can still say that the SFW was one of the most challenging and awesome things I and my friends have attempted. And I enjoyed it and the great response it generated. But now we're planning a FAR larger thing in December. A sort of a Open Source Mega Fest at the top levels.

More soon, I'm too sleepy!

Cheers
Shashank
PS: No technical work has been possible over the past one week
PPS: Metallica released their new album called "Death Magnetic". Most of the songs are just average in my scale. I like "Cyanide" and the intro of "That was just your life". And Kirk Hammet is finally playing guitar solos again. His solos were cut out of the last album: "St. Anger", which was a welcome return to Thrash Metal. In my opinion, all the songs on the St. Anger album sounded like an army of tin-soldiers sprinting over a tin bridge, and a song playing in the distant background. Heh!