So day before- the 30th I had my first event as the Campus Ambassador of Sun Microsystems. Nice start I’d say. Never did I expect so many people to come for the first event. It took me quite some time to make a 100-slide presentation which covered the introduction of What Open Source is and continuing to give a brief description of the Sun Open Source technologies. Well although it was supposed to be only an introduction, I did cover a lot about these things, thanks to help from all the various presentations at the induction program. Furthermore, an introduction to the Code For Freedom contest and specially to the OpenSolaris and NetBeans project. I was shocked to see the crowd, cause we really did not prepare for so many people. Even before the session had commenced the no of students had exceeded the number of chairs (we had made arrangements for about 80, and the turn up was over 100) and they were more than willing to just stand and be a part of the presentation. It was quite an interactive session cause the students were more open to me than they would have been if I were a teacher. What was most impressive is that even at the end of the 2 hour long session there were quite a few bright faces and they wanted to see a small demo on how to make a NetBeans plugin. And its a little difficult when you have only 8 pens as giveaways for such a large crowd. I guess I did a fairly good job by giving them to those who were most involved in the presentations. Anyways a good start, lets see how well my learning curve rises. And I’d like to thank the members of the Sun Club for their help during the event.





Moving to other things… Leopard has been introduced and after reading the Ars Technica review I feel really good for 2 things. Firstly that I know really what to expect from Leopard. Secondly I am feeling really great to be associated with technologies that are being imported into Mac OS X from Sun, namely DTrace and ZFS. You never know, even Zones might be on its way. Definitely there are some great things in OpenSolaris and adoption of some of them into Mac would surely improve the already top of the line product.

And FINALLY Panjab University is having its elections. After series of court cases against the party leaders and the political parties themselves finally matters have resolved and things are really bad here. Things have to conform to the guidelines set by the Lyngdoh Commission as ordered by the supreme court. Finally all those guys who have any standing reappears, or marks below 60 percent or attendance below 75% are not allowed to compete for elections. Uff… basically all those guys/gals who have given their heart and sole for the elections are out of it!! And most of the parties are having difficulties in finding any candidate who satisfies all the clauses of Lyngdoh Commission. I have heard that the parties have annouced in the Girls’ Hostels that anyone having attendance above 75% is welcome to be a candidate for the post of Vice President. Basically no bright student is a part of politics and now the parties cannot do without them. This is the third time I am facing PU elections and everytime it brought in a new flavour with itself.

And finally… Its really unfair that M$ still enjoys monopoly over the software market…..

Edit: Some pictures shared… And download the presentation from <a href=”http://souvikdasgupta.com/sharedocs/Open_Source_CFF.pdf">here