OSS CAMP

31 January 2009 was a momentous day in the Department of Computer Engineering as it witnessed the first OSSCamp in Uttarakhand that saw the convergence of all geeks in COT and visitors from New Delhi, who had eagerly waited for this opportunity for months. The day began with the Computer Department bursting with activity and registrations proceeding at full speed as swarms of OSSophiles inundated the scene. In around 3 hours more than 250 participants had registered themselves for the camp including some participants from colleges other than COT. The unconference began a little behind the schedule at 12:15p.m. with Mr. Kinshuk Sunil of OSS Cube talking about the concept and significance of Open Source. The session proceeded on a light note as students gathered basic ideas of open source codes, licensing issues and most importantly, open source murga!!! This was only a warm-up exercise compared to the more serious talks that followed. However, before Mr. Manu Goel of the Sapient group began, 114BN, the venue of the unconference, saw a mass exodus of students who hurried off to feed their famished stomachs. But Mr. Manu continued, nonetheless and delivered a fabulous talk on JavaScript, DOM and AJAX. It was a talk that was highly interactive in nature and a lot of queries were entertained during the session. The proceedings of the event were interrupted by a short break for lunch. The third talk began at 2:45p.m. at the same venue with Mr. Ajay Ahuja from SUN Microsystems. He talked about OpenSolaris and its unique features like ZFS and Dtracing. He also introduced the participants to new technologies like OpenSPARC and SUNs contribution to Linux, finally concluding with a quick review of the talk that spanned almost 2 hours and a Q&A round in which participants were able to grab a few goodies. Besides, everyone also got OpenSolaris and NetBeans installation CDs free of cost! It was perhaps the best, most interactive and most actively participated in talk of the day as Mr. Ahujas energy and enthusiasm successfully kept the participants from dozing off. Next, Mr. Toshendra Sharma(Final Year, IT, COT) explored prospects in 3D animation in Open Source with Blender but probably the talk became too technical for novices who fled the scene. However, few of them returned at 6:00p.m. to attend the talk on PHP presented by Ms. Kanika Singhal( IIIrd Year, Computer Engg, COT). It lucidly explained beginner level PHP coding and PHPs advantages over JavaScript, ASP etc, which was a huge relief after the hard core technicality of Blender. Finally, at 6:45p.m, Mr. Manu entertained participants requests of a talk on CSS and gave live demonstrations for the same. He showed basic techniques of styling the appearance of webpages to create a good user experience as he called it and answered questions that participants asked about problems they faced with CSS. With the conclusion of this talk, the first day of the camp officially ended. The second day of OSScamp started with an informal introduction of the experts with the students. The people discussed about the flaws of the previous days talks. Further on the environment was warmed up with playing a game. The game quite beautifully overcame the boredom of the students and maintained the environment quite interactive. The students as well as the experts enjoyed it wholeheartedly. This warm up session followed with talk on networking. The TCP/IP, tunneling, proxy, IP address and the loopholes in network security were discussed thoroughly. The discussion on viruses and why linux is not infected by them were also a part of it. After all this there was lunch break of one hour. All the invitees were gathered in the Brijwasi canteen, the place booked for the lunch. The place was echoing with the songs of IT experts. This was a rare scene when the computer technocrats could be seen singing songs. After lunch break now the dice was given to College of Technology students when Saurabh Saxena, Final Year, Electronics and Communication Engineering gave a talk over Advanced PHP. The students who want to see themselves as web designers showed their great interest in it. The session was quite an interactive one. Next Mr. Kartik Asooja, third year, Computer Engineering, Saurabh Shekar Verma, third year, Computer Engineering and Abhinav Pundir, second year, Computer Engineering explored the prospects of OpenGL, stands for Open Graphics Library. Then this is followed by open discussion on Javascript, AJAX by Mr. Manu Goel , from Sapient Group, Gurgaon. This was a highly interactive session. The students discussed about various features of javascript as well as WebFrontend Careers and Web development. OSScamp, Pantnagar finally over with an introduction talk on e-governance by Mr. Nilesh from YouthV.com.