I visited LBS College of Engineering, Kasaragod for a workshop organised by thier collegeOSUM Club. This was my first workshop outside NITK. They had suspended the classes for the afternoon so that most of them could attend the workshop. And its really great that the college is supporting them for the OSUM club as college’s support is of prime importance for the growth of the club.

They had booked the seminar hall from 1:30 till 4:00. It takes about 2 and half hours to travel from my college to Kasaragod. I was accompanied by my friend Manjunath. We left at 10:00 and reached Kasargod by 12:30 in the afternoon. We were received by Allan and his group members. They took us in their car for lunch and then from there we were driven to their college. I ate as much less as possible as I had to feel comformtable while giving the talk. Their college was on top of a small hill. The seminar hall was full by the time we reached the venue and we were in time unlike other speakers who most of the time reach the venue late. The seminar hall was packed and i guess some 150+ students attended the workshop.

We were introduced as the chief guests by one of their club members. The talk was also attend by their faculty co-ordinator. I had prepared on a higher concepts in Java- Strings, File I/O, Serialization, Multithreading, Graphics, Event Handling, Swing. I gave a brief overview of each of them and also wrote some simple programs using the Netbeans IDE. I extensively used the white board to explain different concepts. I gave them a brief overview of OOPS concepts as they were familiar with OOPS, i did not spend much time there. Also I had few goodies to give away for which I asked questions during my presentation. I felt the auidence was shy to answer may be because they were not familiar with the speaker I also carried few Netbeans 6.5 discs and OpenSolaris discs to distribute to the club members. This presentation was totally unlike my usual presentation. This time I was slow, interacting with the audience, cracking PJs between .

The OSUM Club had made perfect arrangements and the event went on really well. This was their first OSUM club event and there were a lot of expectations from me and I feel i did my job to the best possible extent. Hope this event will attract more students to be a part of the club.

Looking forward to visiting more colleges for presentations

I will upload the photos and share the link soon!


Just wanted to let you know about an exciting event siliconindia is organizing on June 6th (Saturday in Bangalore). There will be 100 most promising technology startups showcasing their products. I had been to the event last year and found it interesting.

Please be sure to visit the event website here.

Roll up your Sleeves. Meet over 100 cool startups of your city. Learn new Technologies
Come. Meet the Startups that will become tomorrow’s industry leaders.

• Watch live product demonstrations
• Get a peek into cutting edge technologies
• Lay hands on the best-of-breed solutions
• Meet young, energetic, passionate geeks
• Experience the culture of innovation in small companies
• \Visionary Keynotes
• In-depth Panel Discussions

This is undoubtedly the biggest event for startups.

There are limited seats. You can register yourself for FREE here.

Great Indian Developer Summit- 2009, Day-4. GIDS.Workshops:

DSL workshop by Venkat

This was the last day of the Great Indian Developer Summit-2009. There were 15 workshops running in parallel at 4 different halls. Workshops covered areas like JRuby, DSLs, Silverlight, Oslo, .Net, Hibernate, Adone Flash platform, COBOL among others. The first workshop I attended was “Developing external DSLs in Java” and was taken by Venkat Subramaniam who is regarded as the languages geek. He spoke about the need for Domain Specific Languages(DSL), different types of DSLs which include Internal DSL and External DSL. He told that internal DSLs can be created by using languages like Groovy, Ruby among others and External DSLs can be created using languages with higher parsing abilities like Java, C++, C#. Internal DSLs are also called as embedded DSL. He aslo threw some light on EasyB which is basically a behavior oriented design tool. He spoke at lenght on how to use Java to create external DSL using xText and Eclipse. He later gave a demo on using xText and created a game DSL. Sadly i couldn’t work it out on my comp as I did not have xText plugin installed in Eclipse.

Ola Bini and JRuby

JRuby Duke

The second workshop was “Introduction to JRuby” delivered by Ola Bini, who is one of the core developers of JRuby. He started with speaking about Ruby and JRuby features which was a repitition for me as i had attended his JRuby talk the other day. As he went ahead with his talk, I was busy configuring my Linux for running JRuby applications. Once he started writing some code i followed the same and got some taste of Ruby and JRuby. As the session progressed he went into much higher aspects of JRuby and finally spent some time explaining Ruby on Rails. RoR was the reason why Ruby developed interest which wasn’t there before though Ruby was much older than Java. Using RoR was similar to that of using Grails so there wasn’t much difficulty in getting the general idea but the Ruby related aspects were tough to digest. But i really appreciate and admire the languages Groovy and Ruby for they have added Elegance to the programming which was earlier very verbose thanks to Java . Though I really like the way Java is but once i was introduced to Groovy and Ruby, Java seemed like C to me.

Jim Webber in action

By the end of second workshop i was exhausted and rushed towards the dinning area for the last Lunch of GIDS-2009. As usual the lunch was really good with variety of dishes prepared for the developers to choose from which is analogous to the numerous technologies available. The third workshop was on “Web and Web based services and its integration” which by Jim Webber. Jim Webber is Director of ThoughtWorks and is the guru of web and web services. He spoke at length about Web, Web Characteristics, RESTful Web among other things. I was really tired and after a heavy lunch i couldn’t concentrate during this session, so i walked off and spent some time waiting near the registration desk to collect the summit T-Shirt. There was a developer awards function hosted by Cyrus Broacha  and i was eager to attend this function but i was really sick by the end of the day and had no courage to sit for another hour.

ThoughtWorkers under lens

GIDS-2008 and GIDS-2009 have been great learning experiences for me. Listening to best speakers from around the world and there were ocassions when the creators of the technology spoke about their creation. Its feels really great to listen to the creators themselves. The only thing i would want to change in the Great Indian Developer Summit is that they should be introducing some concesison for the student community because that is the heart of action. Though we students may not be experienced with new technologies but surely after listening to such great speakers will instill the desire to learn. GIDS is really a great initiative from Saltmarch media and I am looking forward to attending GIDS-2010 [This was the same thing i had written in my blog about the last edition ].

GIDS- Great Indian Developer Summit.

GIDS-2009 Captured

My experiences at GIDS-2008 can be read here, here and here.

My experiences at GIDS-2009 can be read here and here.

I was facing a problem while clearing the Trash in Ubuntu. I wasn’t able to delete certaion folder and i got the message stating “Access Denied”. So i was wondering that there should be some way to do it from the command prompt using sudo and some command. I did a google for the requirement and found the following shell snippet:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/

Source: Ubuntu Forum.

Ola Bina during JRuby talk

I started off pretty late for my Day-2 (summit’s Day-3) at the summit, courtesy- extended sleeping But I somehow managed to not miss much of the first session. The first session I attended today was “Introduction to JRuby” which was delivered by Ola Bini. He spoke about Ruby and its features like Blocks, Modules, Mixins among others. He then spoke about JRuby and how it eliminates the pain of using Java and leverages on the ease of Ruby. JRuby is basically Ruby running on JVM. This was developed keeping in mind the old legacy JavaEE based applications.

Venkat during Know u'r Java

Second session was “Know your Java?” delivered by my favorite speaker Venkat Submramaniam. He is a great speaker and i am sure one can continue to listen to him for long hours with out sleeping and getting bored. He did not bore us with the different Gotchas in Java but in turn asked the audience to choose the topic which included “string”, “Static”,”Inheritance”, “Math”, “Basic” and the questions were for 1000, 500 and 100 points. Each one had to choose one question and if he/she would answer it correctly would get the points alloted to that particular question. And he took the questions to explain the concept behind it which i feel is a really innovative way for such kind of topics. I am sure that he had written an application to help him out with this. There were few ppl who scored 1000 and they got the copies of books authored by him. Even last year in GIDS-2008 he gave away his .NET Gotchas book, but for this year’s event he had 4 books on Scala, Groovy, Agile Development and .NET to give away.

McClanahan during RESTful talk

The third session was on “RESTful approach” to developing applications which was devlivered by Craig McClanahan who was incidentally from Sun Microsystems and i was happy to see someone from Sun and was happy to see someone use NetBeans He spoke at length about REST and its different aspects like URI, Actions, Resources and so on. It was a verbose talk with out any code demo but there were 2 demos later in the day one on REST applications using JAX-RS and another using RoR. But the talk was really resourceful and McClanahan is the creator of Apache Struts!!!!

McClanahan during JAX-RS talk

The fourth session for the day was on “Developing RESTful applications using JAX-RS” which was again delivered by McClanahan. But he took a lot of time to summarise what he spoke in the previous session and when he was about to demo the application NetBeans crashed But he spoke about using Jersey which is the reference implementation of JAX-RS for creating RESTful applications. He told that resources were represented using POJOs and annotations were used to indicate which method to be called for which link- in other words using annotations to map the URI’s and Resource class and methods.

Venkat in action

The fifth session for the day was “Programming Groovy” again by Venkat Subramaniam. This was a really superb session and haviing been read thru his Programming Groovy book this session was more like a revision for me. He covered all the major concepts in Groovy and the best part of his session was that it was Powerpoint free. He explained all the concepts by writing code snippets. We were starlted to see the simplicity of Groovy and most of the audience had lots of doubts about the language and many of them missed their team to flock around Venkat to get their doubts cleared.

The sixth session was on SOA delivered by Jim Webbers. The speaker was a great actor and his presentation was lively and the audience were laughing thourgh out his presentation. Even i was laughing but i dont know the reason why i was laughing because i wasn’t listening to his talk but am writing this blog post .

My Day-2 (Day-3 of the Summit) at Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 was really interesting and i learnt a lot of new concepts, listened to really lively talks. I feel Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 is the best i have attended so far. Am seriously looking forward to attend Great Indian Developer Summit-2010. Meanwhile i have GIDS.Workshops to attend tomorrow. I will surely be attending Venkat’s workshop, then workshop on JRuby and the thirs i havent yet finalised

Visit The Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 official site here.

Read My Day-1 experiences at The Great Indian Developer Summit-2009 here.

I had attended the Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 which was held from May 19-25. I got a pass using which i attended Bleeding edge .NET and RichWeb though i had very very less experience on .NET. It was truly an amazing experience. And now here I am in Great Indian Developer Summit 2009. But this time i had to fund the expenses myself. I chose to attend RichWeb, Daring java and the Workshop sessions. Unlike last year each technology was covered only for a day and also the cost of registration decreased. The day’s proceeding were to start at 10:00 which included the registration, Welcome key note among others. Incidentally it happened to be poll time for B’loreans and after i finished my mandatory work of voting i rushed to the Auditorium in IISc where the summit was to be held.

The first session was on Enterprise 2.0 taken by Rajesh Ramachandran. From the word go I was sleepy and fought hard to keep my eyes open. All these Enterprise stuff is beyond my capablities He gave an insight on Web 2.0 and then quicikly went to finer aspects of Enterprise 2.0(E2O). He spoke about features of Enterprise 2.0, challenges and solutions and the Key drivers of Enterprise 2.0

The second session was my Fav. It was about Grails- which i believe is a really good framework to work on. This was devliered by Venkat Subramaniam, who is a really good speaker. What I like about Venkat’s talk is that there less of presentation and more of demo/coding. He quickly built a web application using grails framework, spoke about the features of the framework and there were many questions which he tackled tactfully.

Venkat's Grails Talk

By this I was tired and really hungry. The lunch was arranged at the venue. The lunch was outsourced to The Chancery and was good. After the lunch I went around the stalls, getting the Summit passport stamped by various stalls. It feels so bad that many go to the stall just to get their passports stamped and not listen to what they have to say. I answered a quiz at IBM stall and never thought that I would be lucky to win a IBM Developer Works bag and Parker pen. I still cant believe that i have won something

The third session was on different ways of debugging AJAX and again delivered by Venkat. It was really interesting talk where the speaker spoke about different debugging tools and techniques for debugging AJAX applications. During the talk he even distributed toffees to those who would just speak to

him and the person with most toffees got a gift from him. After this there was a key note address on Sony Ericsson’s developer world which i missed. There was a small tea break and this was followed by a session on Developing Rich application using Adobe Flash platform. There were 2 speakers and they spoke about the need for Rich applications and how Adobe Flash platform helps us to do it. They spoke about building SaaS applications and how the application can be used by different users.  Also they spoke about using Flex to access Java Objects and use flex with the server side languages with stress on MVC architecture.

Looking forward to tomorrow’s Java sessions and Groovy session by Venkat in particular.

IPL is back after a year! One year has passed so quickly, the Rajasthan Royals final match is still fresh in my mind This time IPL is being held out of India- Indian Premium League in South Africa Its was a day of upsets everywhere, a day of upset for me either- tough SE Exam paper The Inaugural match between Mumbai Indians(MI) and Chennai Super Kings(CSK) was at some point interesting but then MI comfortably won the match (looks comfortable for ppl watchin on TV, may not be for the players ) The main take aways from that match was- Tendulkar continuing his New Zealand form started off IPL in stlye with a 50 , Nayar smashed 3 sixes in Flintoff’s over (hope he sleeps peacefully tonight and those sixes don’t haunt him ). Malinga fierce with the ball- he is fiercefull without the ball either. And and any other key MI performances- I cant recall. Coming to CSK they had very little to cheer about- Gony took few wickets, Dhoni hit few runs ( Gony and Dhoni are so rhyming), so did Hayden. In the end wat matters is the winner and its MI (not Mission Impossible )

The second match- Bangalore Royal Challengers(B’lore RC) Vs Rajasthan Royals(RR). This match was played in the filled to capacity ground situated on Earth. I had taken for granted the RR(not Reading Room) would not win (everyone would have read it as would win) the reason being B’lore RC had like of Ryder, Taylor, Kevin (the other part of the name is too long), Dravid (order for listing is the batting order) and so on … B’lore RC had a great start- Ryder and Taylor falling cheaply, sorry very cheaply playing some stupid shots. Unlike 10Dulkar they couldn’t continue their good performances in New Zealand. Then Dravid resurrected the innings with a solid, rock solid, wall solid performance. Was he supported by Kevin?- No. I dont know wat Kevin was doing on the pitch- Was he dancing? I dont think he was batting . With a modest total- 133 to chase i thought RR would win but then there was a different story altogether. One by one RR batsmen fell initially to Praveen Kumar, Ryder (not fell in love, they got out) then finally to Kumble. Actually Kumble accounted for 50% of RR batsmen (i think he will be skipping his dinner). All these led to RR getting bowled out for 58- wow only 58.

Now its time for some Chak De India scenes in the RR dressing room given by Shilpa Shetty. Mallya will be happy- still not happiest because B’lore RC has a long way to go. Wat will Mallya be doing for B’lore RCs? Full time belting Ryder and Taylor, praising Dravid, Kumble, Praveen. Party time in B’lore RC dressing room, sponsored by UB Group

I had spent a lot of time setting the $PATH on my Ubuntu but i forgot to document the procedure. So when my friend asked me, i wasn’t able to help him out. So this time i asked him to tell the solution so that i could note it down. The best place would be my blog.

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java
export JAVA_HOME
PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
export PATH

Source: The Ubuntu Guy.

Hello friends,

Let Me Know

Here’s a good news for all the twitters out there- Let Me Know- the one and only information portal is now on twitter, making it more reachable. So why waste time quickly follow Let Me Know at Let Me Know Update.

This has been arguably my worst year so far!   Though my memory is not that lasting and its not that volatile either. I have made all my efforts to write down things/events happened last year.

1. Joining Let Me Know [www.letmeknow.in]: I joined Let Me Know team at the end of 2008 and my contribution to the team started mainly from January 2008 and have been a part of the team for over an year now. We have made a lot of progress over an year- with a wide base of readers and over 600 opportunities spanning 7 different areas. We moved from this (blog) to this (now both redirect to the same new portal). Initially i was covering all the events but later February-march we got a pretty good team and my area of focus reduced to Technical Fest!! But later on after the month of May the blog was left to the responsiblity of few and the work during that time increased and also the flow of information reduced. We took a major step of having our own portal and this was all the brainchild of Nitin Rao, the Founder of Let Me Know. He spoke with lot of ppl including Web Developers, speaking to various ppl on Fund Raising and at last we hired Grayscale Design- The most creative technical students i have met. They designed the complete portal from scratch and achieved to our expectation both in terms of the functional requirements and the site asthetics. I feel the current Let Me Know site is the most easy to use site i have ever seen!!! We have few plans at the back of our mind and Nitin has been a great source of inspiration for me and my work!

2. 4th Semester debacle: 4th sem is the worst of all the semesters so far- the only reason being i got the least GPA and that really pulled down my Cumulative GPA. This sem had a few alien subjects- Computer Graphics, microprocessors to name a few. Microprocessors is an interesting subject but the way it was taught never appealing. There was a lot of confusion in the lab- Thanks to the final year students taking it. Otherwise, it would have been one of fav subjects and would have helped me to take up embedded systems. But now i tremble with fear on hearing the word “Microprocessors”. We had a mini project in this sem and it was to creat a software package which would support a basic paint tools and also include a provision for animation of those graphical objects. I had decided to use Java for developing the application and i knew it would need a lot of Swing and AWT stuff and i was prepared for that. I even got a copy of my senior’s project to have a look how exactly the package must look like finally. His was a pretty impressive package and was appreciated by most of them. We were 3 in a team and the complete package was coded by only me- i dont remember how much time i spent on this and the final application has some thousands of lines of code all written by me. But finally i ended up getting a BC- It was so dissapointing- There were groups whose package was no where close to mine but they got BB, AB and those who did not submit got BC. So my package was equivalent to not submitting. I had given the package a complete professional look and when ever i think about this i feel really dissapointed. Thanks a lot to the teacher who never cared to look out for the features of my package. She was sitting as if we had forced her to check my application. The worst thing was- We could change the code of the package to get the output for the question given for the Mid Sem and End Sem lab exam. This was so foolish- The application designed is for someone else’s use and how can the user keep changing the source code to do a partiuclar work. What i ifeel is that the application should have been tested for the features and its level of usage- which was not done. No point in grumbling now. Ahaa.. i forgot about the great Unix Lab- I got the output in mid sem/end sem and all other labs but i got a BC- the common thing between Miniproject and Unix Lab is the grades were given by the same teacher x-(  Anyways i got fairly bad in all the labs- 3 of t hem including the Mini project this pulled down my GPA to 7.92 i could not score much in theory. Also in this sem i was really passionate to become the Campus Ambassador, Sun Microsystems for my college for which i sent out my resume [Guess i had a proper resume in 4th sem which i have changed totally now]. I used to rearly stay in my room- its pretty obvious why ppl dont like to stay in their rooms- and i used to spend most of the time in Room No 27, 7th Block which was just opposite to my room no 3. We had a really great time in 4th sem- We used to play MotoGP whole day and even days before the exams. We were so fearless and we never missed even a single episode of Roadies 5.0. And there was this song “Jinke Mari na” which was really popular during those days and we made it a point that it was played in my friend’s room (Room No 27) atleast once a day.  These were some noteworthy incidents of 4th Sem.

3. Holidays and Internships: We have 3 months of vacation after every even sem. This time i had thought of preparing for SCJP and be certified by June 30. I was skeptical about an internship but what changed my mind i approached on kind CEO who agreed upon allowing me to work under him. But it was my fate that one of his team members fell sick and had to go back home. He was the person who had to assign me some work. While around in the office i spent time working on REST Web Services and also learnt C#, ASP.net. But that was the last i used .NET. Nitin introduced me to one of his friend’s, Priya Naik, who helped me to work under her. She was really passionate about what ever she was doing and i really enjoyed the work of research and analysis. This was really different experience as i had not ventured into Non technical work before. This opened up lots of opportunities for me and also my reach. But all these were not encouraging for my SCJP stuff and though i managed to complete Kathy Sierra book but i was not confident. Gone were the days and i havent found time to prepare for it agian. I should have cleared it in 3 months vacation That was about pretty exciting boring holidays.

4. Selected as Campus Ambassador for Sun Microsystems: This was one of my cherished moments when i got to know that I was selected as the Campus Ambassador for Sun Microsystems. This led to me meeting many ppl and met someone who was really special for me until sometime I organised my first independent workshop in the first week of August which was a 3 day workshop on Java. In the interim i got in touch with a particular person who i never thought would turn out to  be cause for turn arounds during my 5th Sem and early 6th Sem. I organised few workshops as part of Sun Club activities but havent been able to do much lately. Have planned few events for 2009 hopefully will organise them soon.

5. Holidays again!! : These were the holidays between 5th sem and 6th sem, to be more specific after the odd sem. I spent these holidays studying GWT, Ajax, PHP, JSP and so on… I also managed to end up working on PHP but my work hasn’t seen the light yet. Waiting for something big to do!

6. 5th Sem and early 6th Sem: These semesters were filled with anecdotes some out of which had happy ending and few others Sad ending and few no ending at all Being selected as the CA of my college i had great amount of responsibility and being in 3rd year added to those responsibilities. I met a really interesting person who would have gone unnoticed by me had that person not appraoched me. By the way its a girl. I used to chat with her even before i met her and the first time i saw her was during Web Club recruitments. And i am hardly interested in speaking to them but this person was really different and i could gather just enough information about her and i can judge ppl fairly well though not an expert in it but can do a bit of good work for myself. We had lots of conversations but all started and ended with Tech and had teamed up for TGMC, event organised by IBM. Being novice in web applications and UML i could be of not much help for the team though i tried working for it so hard that I ended up sacrificing my ADS Lab grades But i couldn’t hide few things and when i opened up- its was all the end to something which had just started. But i am pretty happy that i managened to keep up my cumulative GPA unlike 4th sem. One of the most impressive works was my mini project which fetched me a AA !!!! I made it so very uer friendly that ppl had to hardly type anything for getting their work done. It was a Single User simple relational database. Tough the functionalities were less but it was really easy to use. There are so many things which i would like to write but not enough energy to type then down here. Early 6th Sem was a great disaster and i would say better forget the early 6th Sem.

These was a recap in brief of year 2008. Hoping for some real action in 2009- really important year in my life- Placements, higher studies and what not.