December 2008


It has been a long time I travelled along with a number of friends. Yesterday I had been to Kasargod for attending Widad’s Marriage party. Widad was my senior at MEC and passed out last april. She is a nice friend of mine and an amazing techie during the college. Of course she is an FOSS savvy girl. Her husband Jemshad is a Yahoo and well known geek. We friends were making fun out of him thinking what would be his chat status during marriage. We guessed it would be ‘brb’ :D. But widad commented mostly it is ‘afk’. It was fun.

Six friends of mine from MEC boarded in Mavel express on Saturday night 11.30 pm. Srijith, Cyriac, Cijo, Rathin, Sadhashiv and Neelakandan were the guyz. Neelakandan and Sadhashiv had only general compartment tickets and they didn’t get the reservation. But altogether they had 5 reservation tickets. So they requested TTR to make some adjustment, but he didn’t allow them. Finally Neelakandan was out of reservation list and he became inside general compartment. I boarded into the train from Mahe. A few hours later Neelakandan came to the reservation compartment. Everyone expected him to burst out against Sadahashiv for leaving him alone at general compartment. But unluckly it didn’t happen. He spoke like a Brand Ambassador of general compartment that it was a fine inside general compartment. When the train approached Kangangad, we realised that Cheif Minister of Kerala, V.S Achuthananthan was there in our train. We went to Govt guest house straight way from kasargod station. But the policemen at the guest house questioned us like a culprit since Chief Minister was going to have the accomodation there. Widad arranged us some other hotel and went there. Rathin had brought his laptop. He was worried about his mini project about Wireless networks. Srijith and I decided to hack on the Network Manager, though we failed to find some intersting bytes. BTW, Cijo was hacking with bash for a while.

We guys spent few hours at the marriage party. Met a good number of xmecians. We were having great fun altogether. It was a geek company and I enjoyed the with everyone. Srijith, Cyriac, Rathin, Cijo and I are from computer science and we belong to MACS(MEC’s Association of Computer Students), being the organisers of FOSSMEET @ MEC we were in search of ‘freedom images’. After the marriage party, we had an hour journey to Bakel forte, which is a famous tourist destination. I didn’t my camera being lazy and since we have our Photographer (Cyraic) with us.

Bakel

We took a couple of photographs which portraits the natural beauty of the coast. When we were in the beach, I suggested to photograph FOSSMEET written on the sand. Cyraic’s face lit up saying our hunt for the ‘freedom’ photograph is over. We wrote and photograped FOSS @ MEC on the sand. it looked very great and its going to be put on FOSSMEET website header.

Scribing FOSSMEET

We set back to railway station from Bakel fort around 5 pm. We reached the station few seconds before the train leave. Of course, that was a narrow escape. Neel, Sadhashiv and I took in the general compartment and Wowed ! There was lots of free seats. We talked a lot about MEC and Free and Open Source Software during the journey. Sadhashiv and Neel was maintaining the funny elements all over the journey.

From life.blog
FOSSMEET banner
From life.blog

I enjoyed the entire day well.

Note: Photography courtesy to Cyriac Chittuthara

I am entering another phase of academic circle and the same time going to hack on some more life instances. It was partly failure with life during my IIIrd semester since I was bad with health.

Now university semester exams are over and I am in the IVth semester. Around three large FOSS conferences : FOSS.IN, National Free Software Meet, International Freesoftware Conference has passed by and I couldn’t make my presence at any of there conferences due to various reasons. I really miss all those events. It is very glad to see that God’s own country is hosting numerous FOSS events.

I have been extremely busy at college being the part of organising team for Technopreneur and Excel 2k9.

Technopreneur 2009

Technopreneur is an annually conducted event hosted by Model Engineering College, Cochin. So many great personalities will be present at the event, delivering inspiring talks and interacting with attendees. It is a golden opportunity for everyone to interact  with CEOs and several other great personalities. Over the past version of Technopreneur several CEOs like Kris Gopalakrishnan of Infy, Suhas Gopinath of Globals, S. Parthasarathy of Mindree Consulting had present during the event. This time it is scheduled for Jan 31st and will be held at Gokulam Park Inn, Cochin.

The highlight speakers of Technopreneur 2009 includes Kiran Bedhi (first woman to get IPS in India), N. Ram ( Cheif Editor THE HINDU), Sarath Babu (The CEO of Foodking) and more. Wait for the techopreneur promotional blog post.

I am involved with Webdesign work  for the Technopreneur 2009. The website will be up in a couple of days and registration will be open. Check out http://www.technipreneurmec.org .

FOSSMEET @ MEC

The latest with Model Engineering College is about FOSSMEET which is almost scheduled to be conducted in accordance with Excel 2k9. MEC is a FOSS planet. Because we run our college completely on Free and Open Source Tools. We run our LABS completely on Debian and hosts web server, mail server, dns server on LAMP. Even though we have lots of potential geeks who work on GNU/Linux platform, we miss out community style of hacking. Our enthusiasts are scattered. We aim at organising all enthusiasts at MEC through this fossmeet so that more and more contributers will come out from MEC.

Since the one day fossmeet is going to be conducted for the first time, I have to hold certain burden of making the stuff work. I am seeking for sponsorship for the FOSSMEET. It would be worth for any Organisation / Company to sponsor the fossmeet at Model Engineering College, Cochin since we are running on FOSS for the past one decade. Moreover numerous students and delegates will be present at the Excel 2k9 so that it is a better place for advertising. So please do come forward, promote foss. Help us to make it happen.

happy hacking !