Sun TechDay at VIT University

Sun Microsystems recently came to our college to conduct a TechDay (also called: "SunDay", which co-incidentally was held in our college on a sunday too!) on March 1st, 2009. The event comprised of four workshops - on J2ME, Solaris, and JavaFX. We had to conduct two parallel sessions of J2ME instead of one (so J2ME counts for 2) because the response was so great -- we got double the no. of registrations we had expected! The expected nos. for each session was 70 which works out to 210 in total for the three sessions, but we registered 162 for J2ME, 85 for Solaris and 124 for JavaFX = 371 registrations!

The engineers who conducted the sessions were excellent, the sessions were really informative, and we're already receiving requests for another TechDay from those folks who missed out on the registrations as well as those who attended (for sessions on advanced topics). We're planning another version of this somewhere at the start of the next semester.

The task of organizing the entire show fell upon the Sun Open Source Community that me and Aditya had kicked off in December last year, and the team of 9 core members and 23 associates that was selected did an exceptional job! Frankly I gave a pretty conservative estimate to the Sun folks when asked initially about the participation, keeping in mind the previous events, and other issues like 1st being a sunday and the SEDS India National Conference happening at the same time. But the members of the Sun Core and the Sun Associates did a fabulous job in getting so many registrations, ensuring that all the ground-operations on 1st went smoothly and basically that everyone had a good time. Kudos to them!

Cheers

How to boot from USB in xVM VirtualBox

I've looked around the internet a lot and mostly didn't find any working solution apart from trying to make an image/virtualDisk from a raw physical disk (USB). I was basically experimenting with writing simple bootloaders in assembly language, and wanted to rapidly test and make changes to the code without rebooting my system again and again to try booting. The obvious solution is to use a Virtualization tool like VMWare or xVM VirtualBox by Sun (the latter is free), but the trouble is that neither of them support booting from pen-drives and I have long forgotten the existence of floppy drives, and have thus no way of directly writing to a disk and virtual booting straight-away, without creating an new image of the disk each time I make changes to it. So I decided to write to my USB pen-drive directly and try booting from it. It works when I boot the entire computer with it, but VMWare and VirtualBox do not have the option of booting from a USB device.

So messing around xVM VirtualBox 2.0.2 36488 for Windows yesterday, I was pretty surprised to find my USB Pen-Drive listed under the field of Floppies! That is,

a) Create a new Virtual "Machine"
b) Click on the "Floppy" link in the main screen (right panel)
c) Enable "Mount Floppy Drive", and from the drop-down list in "Host Floppy Device", select your USB drive's Drive Letter (haven't tried it in Linux, I guess you'll have to select the correct device like /dev/sdxx)

That's it. Try starting the Virtual Machine now.

Its quite wierd, and I'm still wondering why my USB drive gets listed under floppy, but it works for me! Neither VMWare Workstation, nor xVM VirtualBox permit booting directly from the USB otherwise.

Cheers
Shashank

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!

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