A Book Grant

Even with gazillions of e-text surrounding your existence, a new book, still generates an excitement that's hardly comparable. And when you get a book grant of Rs. 2500... that's quite a reason to be happy. Don't smirk at the amount, it comes from my company, who unfortunately seems to believe young employees shouldn't be spoiled with handsome figures when money is involved.

The book grant came as a first prize for the Project Readiness Program, which is just another name for training in Wipro Technologies. It consists of three phases - the fundamental readiness programme - a quick recap of C and Data Structures, followed by a month long training on SQL, PL/SQL, Core Java, J2EE. Next you have to make a small project with whatever you have learnt. Anyway, the tests were pretty easy and my total score came to 89.9%.

Next we were trained on Object Oriented Analysis and Design, XML, and from tomorrow, there would be a week long training on EJB. So its been over three months of training, and its nothing close to what you would expect when you are being trained for the industry! It's similar to college days, where many a things are left out which helps you get a deeper understanding of the technology. For example in Formal Language and Automata Theory classes we had in college nobody bothered to talk about XML/DTD when EBNF was discussed ... likewise, here it seems to be just the other side of the same coin.

And I had no idea that configuring Tomcat Oracle 9i, setting proper enviornment variables could generate such humor! Oracle 9i installs XDB, an HTTP listener on port 8080, which is the default port on which Tomcat listens - and things dont work out of the box. The system guys at the external training centers kept formatting the hard drives to troubleshoot these problems - but unlike college there was nobody around to share the fun! Anyway, the admin became good friend after a few similar incidents.

I'm postponing the shoping spree till I have finished the books I have in currently reading queue - Anne Frank - The Diary of a young girl, Only the Paranoid Survives by Andrew Grove, Lateral Thinking by Ed de Bono. In the meantime all suggestions are welcome.

Surviving Bangalore I

Its been almost one and a half month that I have joined Wipro Technologies in Bangalore ... and its been both exciting and disappointing! I came to Bangalore thinking its a dream city with young and dynamic techies everywhere and updated, automated, mechanised way of living. But sadly its not even 25% of what I expected!

Whenever you want something to an extent that you are afraid of losing it - be sure Murphy's law is grinning! Many, joining with me were lucky enough to get Unix System programming(system programming in unix with c++ using tools like gdb, cvs... just the package I wanted) and thanks to the supreme order of randomness in Wipro, I got Java. Only satisfaction is that it seems probably I would be playing with web services a lot.

I'm staying as paying guest in J.P. Nagar 5th Phase. A room-mate of mine, also a fellow wiproite - bought an HP Pavillion dv2000 and took an Airtel broadband. Moreover the "lucky person" got into Unix (thanks to the randomness once again). And like any good FOSS enthusiast, I did not waste time to introduce him to the joys of Ubuntu. But some people are capable of limiting their excitement to "hmmm... good!"

I'm really missing ilug-cal ... Indrada's never ending plans of world domination with FOSS, Sayam's anecdotes on dangerous weekend projects with gnome, SM's neatly formatted words of wisdom, or Debarshi's quick and spot on responses! Even though I was seldom a passive speaker, I was always an active listener - and it was great to see the masters at work - and kudos to all their initiatives in taking free software to everybody!

Somehow I had the idea every other person in Bangalore would be excited about FOSS - but things to be almost same as that back at Kolkata - still limited to a selected few. Expecting GNU/Linux in a cybercafe seems like asking a bit too much! Till now I haven't met a single person in Wipro who is enthusiatic about free software. I'm waiting for FOSS.IN like anything, though chances of attending it seems bleak enough. Wipro has even disapproved the leave for elder my sister's marriage!

Without a system of my own, and breathing insufficient bandwidth ... my dreams of becoming a FOSS contributor seems drifting away into uncertainty now. But the optimistic person inside me says I'm yet to knock the right door, and I'm more hugry and foolish than ever!

As for the good things, the weather here is just right ... and contrary to the popular view that Idly-dosa-sambara are your only choices when it comes to food - you'll find tonnes of choices here! But teetotalists beware ... it seems here there's almost one bar per person ;-)

To be Bangalored ...

One week from now, I would be aboard S2 307 on my way to Bangalore to join Wipro Technologies. And its nothing more than a mashup of feelings that I'm having currently. Firstly, I'm worried about the work I would be getting at Wipro. I have been a part of the Opus Magnum project, that Wipro had undertaken in a bid to make freshers a bit more industry-savvy ... and oh yeah, it was supposed Open Source Software development. Being utterly desperate to be a part of FOSS, there was no second thought before appearing for the selection programming competition (which proved to be cakewalk). A total of 430 students got selected from their innumerable 2007 fresh recruits from all over India.

Me and my partner were extremely hopeful thinking this would be the end of the barriers that have kept us away from joining any FOSS project - SCM tools, how to become familiar with an existing (and overwhelming) code base, patch submitting etiquettes etc. Our project was to write a presence adapter as a part of an IP Multimedia Subsytem, the other parts of which were being built by other students. Each team was assigned a mentor for their project, who would communicate through mail and telephone.

Everything seemed pretty exciting - but slowly the balloon started losing air. Hardly anybody was interested with queries like if the everything should be under GPL, which JDK should we be using ... communication gaps led me wonder how work proceeds in the FOSS projects, and as for technicalities of the project, Google was my friend! But even it has its limits ... its robots can't breach the corporate firewall and give you the names of the variables that your stub would communicate with! Moreover, after you have toiled hard(read googled hard) with your lean and thin desktop to get JBOSS, Eclipse and Axis to work in unison resolving yum dependencies in fedora core 6, extensively documented the process - only to find people for whom you were doing this has "\" in their URI syntax (clearly they were not on GNU/Linux) - you feel, well, not that much excited. And SCM, patch etc, hmmm... I was yet another failure to become a FOSS developer! But I'm still super hopeful with Wipro - its their maiden venture, bloopers may happen!

With roughly fifteen days left to submit the final year project, my partner and I had to give up, to maintain our grades. We submitted a ray tracer written in C++, which my partner had started building as a weekend project.

Secondly, I became friends with the Kolkata lug members just a few months back ... and I've been learning a lot of new things from a lot of new people. Surely, the scene would be similar once I can reach out to Bangalore lug people ... and started visiting #FOSS.IN at freenode ... but I hardly know anybody there!

It feels a bit bad to leave the place you have been calling 127.0.0.1 for 23 years, but on the whole, I'm too exited that I would be able to meet new ubergeeks in Bangalore. Moreover I would be sharing the apartment with a Google employee, and a super-coder ... oooh!

In other news, we have been having fun with kickstart installation with packages from Fedora 7, in the Protos boxes(funny thing is, these are supplied exclusively by Wipro in India). We used system-config-netboot, system-config-kickstart ... but with cobbler was a delight. Things became rather interesting yesterday when I tried to build a .deb package from the src.rpm of cobbler-0.6.0 for my Ubuntu box - my /var/log/dpkg.log became almost 1.5 gb ... and strangely, it found a friend in /var/log/syslog as my new usb dongle (Frontech JIL-0741) filled it up to a similar size preventing even a graphical login :P. And my bid to be mobile-phone-virgin till iPhone was shattered as mom bought me a Motorola L6i, to check on what I'm doing in Bangalore!

Nije Shikhi Day 1

Last Sunday, Indrada asked me if I would want to volunteer for the Nije Shikhi project. Nije Shikhi, is a novel idea that West Bengal University of Technology (WBUT) and L2C2 Technologies have taken up in order create a difference in the way technology is perceived by young minds.
Within few hours me and Susmit, a classmate of mine, were inside Dr. Ashok Ranjan Thakur's (Vice Chancellor, WBUT) room at WBUT, listening to his plans to spread the joy of hacking through FOSS and low cost, eco-friendly computing. The idea is to do something like linutop or koolu (yes, the ltsp brainchild of Maddog Hall) that would be used by students (mostly from underprivildged/rural backgrounds) to self learn, with minimal/no adult supervision. The first school to join the Nije Shikhi project Bijra School. Another aspect of the project is to throw open all its resources to the current students of WBUT and get them involved for managing the technical aspect of the project. Students from second and third year can volunteer in a 21-days long fast-track internship programme in FOSS, which includes working weekends. As Indrada writes in this blogpost, "Our goal is to create small, dynamic teams well-exposed to and capable of carrying on activities in a given area of specialization during their post-internship period." At the end of the project you get a certificate from WBUT.

Here you are free as in freedom... you are encouraged to open up tiniest of screws of the devices - no questions asked! You are also given the luxury of a 2Mbps leased line and the entire library, for your reference. Having said that, the intern is not for the faint-hearted where you doze off without actually doing anything... you would be working under the watchful eyes of Indranil Dasgupta, CTA L2C2 Technologies and a FOSS champion - the learning opportunity is what you limit yourself to!

Yesterday was our first day on the job. The team consists of Susmit, Ananya (another classmate) and me. The goal that we are trying to achieve is customizing Fedora 7, building images and implementing disaster recovery policies for the Nije Shikhi boxes that packs in an AMD Geode LX800 (500 MHz), comes with a 40 GB hard disk, and four usb drives. Currently, we are setting up a pxe install server to serve a custom packaged Fedora 7 derivative to the Nije Shikhi boxes.

If you are interested in taking up this 21 days fast-track FOSS workshop, feel free to send an email to indradg AT l2c2 DOT co DOT in.