Recent Ubuntu Initiatives……. Excellent Management Work

The Ubuntu community has been always been very pro-active as a community and their recent activities are really pointers to an excellent management. What started as an innovative bug quashing program in the way of 5-A-Day has escalated into a competition. With stats being provided who is providing how many fixes, it seems to be an excellent idea to do QA and bug fixes on a priority level. For the stats see here. They have also come up with a modified version of Dell’s original plans of Ideastorm and have launched their own Brainstorm. This is a sure shot way of getting new ideas for the project and opening up the development ideas out of the hands of developers only. Looks like they are making their circle really well

GLUG-NITH serves up a TLDP mirror

In addition to the Fedora and GNU mirrors that is being served by GLUG-NITH, on demand of the University users, a TLDP mirror has also been set up here. After a couple of mails the TLDP mirror admins have added us to the mirrorlist, so that everyone around knows about the mirror and can use it well. Here goes a lot of thanks to the College authorities and kudos to the GLUG-NITH community.

Saraswati Puja revisited

What a hectic 3 days it has been…. Serving a huge food mountain to 1500 hungry people was a tedious task. People just looking for any chance to jump on the food tray while you trying to save it. 5200 rasmalai’s vanished into thin air and so did 8000 puris. My God!!! For the first time in my life I realised how hard a task Mother Nature is facing trying to feed so many hungry people.

Today we went to Sujanpur, a 3 hr. drive from my College to immerse the deity in River Beas. Before we went I did the short puja and aarti as the pandit had not come. My mother would have gone mad seeing me do it. Using the ghanti along with the incense sticks and the aarti was a difficult job and often my process concurrency was broken. We had fun in the bus shouting chants of Jai Saraswati Mata. It is an altogether different matter that the chants got louder while crossing the members of the opposite sex. On reaching the ghat 5 of us took the idol into the water. Believe me, it was tough job. With uneven rocks on the floor and the strong current of the mountain river and the algae, a wrong step meant certain death. 5 more people were holding the 5 people who were holding the idol so that those 5 did not do their immersion. It was fun. On the way back, we had laddoos, samosas and apples. Hemant has made a nice collage of the Puja. The 3 days have gone by and its a bit saddening I will not be part of any more Saraswati Puja celebrations in my college, being in the final year. This is one memory to cherish for a lifetime. I have 125 unread mails in my inbox. That is another pain …………..

Saraswati Puja

It might sound a bit late but then owing to the mid semester exams on 11th February, we had to do it today. Organising Puja for 1500 odd people in an University is a tough task specially when you have 30 organisers and a fruit mountain to distribute. The idol we got from Kolkata was too divine. Over 5 and a half feet it was worth the pain to carry it across 1500 kms. I spent a sleepless night yesterday making the pandal. It was fun playing with hay,sticks,mud. I realised how much fun it is being an Architect and a Civil Engineer especially to see your creation stand tall in front of you.

I have just returned to my room which I left yesterday evening. Preparations are on for tomorrow’s feast, Puri, Sabzi, Rasmalai, Gajar ka halwa. Yum heavenly but then alas the hard work that will go into serving the 1500 people is a bit of a damper. I can hardly keep awake now. Am off to sleep. Got to check my mails before that.

$a.out $success

So finally we got to host a re-run of a.out this time after much delay. All the delay was caused a great deal owing to the unavailability of the participants. It was a bit hectic designing the questions but then things came out cool when it was being moulded into a storyline. The Bourne series rocks and so did the questions.

20 teams made it to the finals and we organised it in the Comp science department lab on 15 systems running RHEL 4 and a 5 Windows system on which we installed OpenSSH. All the participants logged onto the server and had a nice time hacking on the machine christened C Labs. The competition level was mindblowing. The total marks for 4 questions was 900 and 2 teams tied at 580 with the 3rd team at 300 and 4 teams at 150 and 2 at 70. In order to resort the tie I had to run valgrind suite and time commands for memory and time complexity of their programs. It was unfair but then something needed to be done.

Director Sir is out of stations so we need his signatures on certificates. Once that is done we will hold the prize giving ceremony. Participation certificates for the 20 teams and winner certificates for the winners(that sounds stupid as its obvious).Money will also be handed out. 1500,1000,500 for the 1st,2nd and 3rd prizes respectively. I am going to take these guys for a trip for a party else they will not get any money. First prize goes to Agam and Khushboo(Final years), 2nd prize to Ramakant and Sarvendra(3rd years) and  3rd prize to Sandesh and Gaurav(3rd years). 2 first year guys Arnab and his partner(if the partner dude reads this post I am sorry I dont remember your name. Do tell me your name) did a fantastic job as well. Well done.
Congrats to all. I got to rush now else I won’t get dog food in Manimahesh mess.