How we conducted The Mini App Days @Amritapuri – Part 02

If you are blank here with the part 02, go back to part 01  anytime and get the basics done :) so back to the topic - 04 August - The main day

Just looking back, I still remember the warden shouting at us, at about 12:15 am for again disturbing his ice, I think 3rd time in a row. Somehow he got cool and even gave us some cake to make sure we felt comfortable (nice man).

Next morning I was awoke by my phone ringing at 7:15 am by my friend and when I inquired when she had slept yesterday, since it was too early, she told me that she had lost her sleep long before :P ha. We went to the mess, after waking up all the crew-members and taking with us the flex and posters the Reps have given us the previous day mid-night. The girls too joined us from the College and we were startled to see outside participants arriving at 8:30 am onwards.  We had an awesome guidance team set-up near the main gate to redirect all the arriving participants to the Ammas hotel for their breakfast, and they did it well. I still remember Durga and Maneesha waving the only available App-Day poster at the arriving participants so that they recognized something fishy was going on. Fixing the postures was another mess. The team somehow found some thread somewhere, cleaned it up and put up almost three flex here and there in the campus. Just to get that feel :). Meanwhile, the prayer and coir team along with Santhosh somehow arranged the traditional lamp (nilavilakku) somehow and made it available in the lab. The registration desk was set-up on the ground floor with Roopak, Pooja, Anirudh's laptop and Akshay's Tab. Passing through the registration desk later, I saw them busy playing games :) after their work though.

The Reps arrived in the lab by about 10:00 am and Br. Bijuji was grateful to come and light the lamp for us. The reps too lighted the lamp in the tradition and there was one more wick left and Biju ji asked me and Tina to light that one. Lighting a lamp for the first time experience was great :). The event started and we had some problems with the Wi-Fi due to low coverage. Somehow, we could find an alternative, by sharing on of the lap PC connection via WiFi with Tina's laptop. Later, we went down to get the tea and snacks ready and that went too well. Again, as coordinators, we had to wash all the cups to make them drinkable and return the same in time, no worries. Biju Ji came to us in the meantime, appreciated our works and was happy to see our students interacting so nicely with the outside participants. Welcome to Amrita :)

The session was going fun, we distributed the swags, stickers, badges and to add to the surprises, we had the best rain of the year roaring outside, and it was again a tough job to get the participants out till the Ammas hotel to get their lunch ready.

How we conducted The Mini App Days @Amritapuri - Part 01

For a start, let me warn this is not from a developer point of view, but just ignore if I go too technical somewhere, as that happens.

The FOSS@Amrita, or our FOSS Club conducted The Mini App Days @Amritapuri, basically a technical workshop, which involves registered attendees hanging around to build apps for the newly out geek OS - The Firefox OS. The Browser technology gecko, along with B2G runs simply coded HTML files along with little JScript to add to the calculations and JQUERY, HTML5 and other technologies to style them up. The Amrita event that we hosted had almost 15 outside participants and a 35 of Amrita students itself and 3 Mozilla Reps coming in order to color thing up ! namely Naresh, Mithun and Saurabh. Detailed reports of the event is successfully hosted here :)

Coming to the organization point of view, it was of-course a fresh experience for our organization team to conduct such an event, as basically we were new to conducting anything in our college, and since it's Amrita, we have to run around a lot to get a lot of permission letters signed, and again we were in our Second Year only and we got discrete and Integral Maths :\. When I mention permission letters, I would like to mention that at one time, we had about 9 pending letters in our hand, which were all required to reach their destinations within an hour.

[gallery type="rectangular" ids="228,230"]

For the Pre-App days on 28 September, we needn't had to worry much, expect for some lab booking problems, which arose due to one international event which got scheduled on the same day, save us! The Main day event was really an experience. Since our mentor in charge got ill, our sole hope was on our CIR head, Br. Bijukumar, who guided us throughout  the event. It was the first time, I understood, how much hurdles I need to pass even to arrange one time coffee for all the participants. We got the posters printed out somehow for free and pasting it throughout the college was lot fun, specially with my friends Bhagya, Amrutha and Pooja, selecting sensitive areas (mess, water coolers) and pasting stuff!

Pre Mini App Days @Amritapuri

We could successfully conduct the Pre-Mini App Days session yesterday, July 28th 2013. The event was basically aimed for the registered Amrita participants and the new FOSS members in order to introduce them to looks and style of HTML and CSS, so that they could get an edge over others in the upcoming main App Days (04th August). The event started with Aditya's session on HTML, followed by Durga on CSS and an afternoon session on codeacademy. The participants were introduced into the Firefox OS interface and writing apps using HTML, CSS and Javascript on the evening session by Tina and myself. The event concluded with a roughly 45 mins hackathon, in which participants were asked to build up a simple BMI calculator, which many could finish, earning them goodies :)

[gallery type="rectangular" ids="214,216,215,213"]
About 30 participated in the same, and they could come familiar with the basic concepts of designing and scripting. Gallery and description by Jackson Issac :- http://foss.amrita.ac.in/site/2013/07/29/mini-app-day-hackathon-amritafoss/
Thanks to each and everyone who helped us in co-ordinating the event.

The Azheekal Trip

The Azheekal beach is located about 15 minutes to the North of the Amritapuri Ashram,Kollam, and when the FOSS Entertainment team, prepared a plan to visit there, as part of Take-A-Break program during the Vacations, we never expected this much fun. We had been planning for this for a while, and it all took place on June 29th Evening.
We left from the Ashram about 5 in the evening, after our tea, about 8 of us, with our faculty in charge and our dear Bithin from Amrita Cyber Security. We invited our Java instructor from Google, Sandeep Ghuman, who was really bit tired after his Panch-Karmas in his early twenties,and his Dutch friend, Mathewlls (as I heard it). Managing such a team was a bit difficult for our in charge, and we understood the same, keeping ourself in our best.
We waited a lot for a bus, which never came, and had to finally go by two Auto's, as the place was near. Being a resident of the Ashram for a year, I had went to the place already, the second day I reached here, and the feelings were mixed.
Introducing Azheekal, the place is famous for its walk-through of about at least 200 metres into the ferocious sea. Ferocious in the sense, we had a Tsunami, hitting a couple of years before. The walk is serene, specially for the calm river on your right side and the waves of the ocean on your left side. It attracts a lot of tourists, and little of native people, as it's a not so uncommon place in Kerala. All we want was an evening out, and we had it.

Getting into the linux root - grub editing

As this page says root is the user name or account that by default has access to all commands and files on a Linux or other Unix-like operating system. It is also referred to as the root account, root user and the superuser. Getting into the linux root is a necessity when talking about privileges and let me show you how to get the easy access.

You shall need :-

1. An Linux operating system -(Ubuntu ,Fedora or anything .. )


2. Direct access to the system, ie you need to restart it alright.


3. The Recovery mode enabled in the GRUB is not a necessity.

The steps :-

1. So, the vector is the GRUB boot loader, we see just after booting on our system :-


2. Here, select the first option , and press 'e' as it says to edit.(Ubuntu,with LINUX )

Sreesanth- How the Media did the 'FIXING'

The Other Side Of the Story !

Seriously, If you ask me why I am writing this post, again against the media, ' It just irritates me'. Not a humble excuse for an Engineering student for not reading the NewsPaper though. This time , the topic is the IPL Spot-Fixing and Sreesanth- The so called 'Mallu Fixer'.

IPL Spot-Fixing and Sreesanth ? The topic looks matched uneven. Its a fact that the majority of the media seems to ignore, but what hurts me is that the modern educated Indian is too,ignoring it. Firstly, I would like to confess that I have no personal sentiment to this Sreesanth guy other than he is from Kerala, and used to make Kerala and India proud.

Where the media is taking us: -ve popularity

Today when we talk about freedom of the media and serious stuff like that, we often forget or seem to neglect the influence it is having on the society.Here is the front-page of one of the top daily Newspaper in my state, Kerala. I hope many of my non-keralaite readers wont have got the clue, I will make the things clear. The man who is portrayed on the front cover, posing like a superstar is Mr Bhitti Mohanthi, as wikipedia states    'is a high profile criminal sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for raping a German tourist at Alwar, India and was since absconding after he was released on parole on 20 November 2006 to meet his ailing mother at Cuttack, Orissa.' He was arrested recently from my place, Kannur, where he has been working in a Nationalized- bank via fake id's and in fake name.

The point I need to bring to you is not about the capture of this big fraud, but how our media celebrated the arrest. Should he be thrown into the spotlight, like where the newspaper had just put him right now ?. Should the tens and lakhs of readers of the paper be forced to consider him as some war-time hero or whatever. Seriously, I am not envious about someone getting into the front page, but I am bit mad at some criminal like him getting crowned that way.

This is not just standalone instances but the enthusiasm of our media to exploit and celebrate these type negative popularity is getting strong day by day. A month ago it was the intelligent thief - 'Bhandi Chor' issue getting hot every where.Newspapers where explaining each and every steps he took in his missions like a detective novel with a star villain. Even the cunning actions by the police was not appreciated in getting this guy behind the bars.

The effect it has, especially on the coming generation is infinite. Weak people are motivated by the fame they gets, the complexities in their planning and the way they executes the same. They end up rehearsing the same live and often end up in jails. As our former president, Dr. Abdul Kalam quotes in his visions for INDIA speech in IIT-H ," Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why? " .

Hoping for an unbiased-ethical-passionate media, but even the statement looks corrupt. :D

Cheers!