Fireball

Another one gone, and another one gone and another!

So after an year, there won’t be any of juniors at college . It seemed to be an alien land when I went for Pragyan, but the presence of juniors made me feel better. I don’t know much faculties other than Pradeep sir, so it would be totally alien when I visit the college after an year or two.

Farewells, sentiments about leaving the college will be there as usual - but the count of LRSL guys is slowly coming down - I would really miss the entire gang. It would suck to visit college without all these guys. Sitting in the last row and shouting whenever someone enters the lab, all those cricket matches in Lab, long time chats with pradeep sir will all be missed. The ones left in the lab would be Suren and Anshu. Suren, just one more year to go and you are out!

Taggy is joining a startup, after ditching several offers - truly what he wanted. Hari will be working in IBM Bangalore, which could be a nice place for him and his kutti hacks. Vijay has chosen to work as a Research Assistant in IISc Bangalore - which he chose after a lot of thinking. PK, Balli are joining Sun as kernel hackers. GC is heading to CMU and Iyer to Microsoft Redmond. Adi and Evo would be working in Microsoft IDC, I guess. Some of them are moving to Bangalore, so there is good chance to get together.

I’m really happy to see what everyone has chosen for starting their career. Good luck guys, and welcome to Bangalore!

PS: We have 2 GSOCians from NITT - Adi and Anshu! Congratulations!

This is going to be an interesting weekend. I’ll be leaving for NIT Trichy to attend Pengufest - the foss festival by GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy (Yes, after a long time, Glug-T has chosen to come out public) and Pragyan - NIT Trichy’s annual technical festival.

I’m not planning to participate in any of the competitions, but I’m going there for something more exciting - the Guest Lectures. Me, Shashank and Jyotsna along with a team of 10 organized Guest lectures during Pragyan’07. And it was one of the most memorable experiences that I would cherish forever. I couldn’t blog about Pragyan’07 which I regret(But, I did it for Pragyan’06).

I was there with Pradeep for Pragyan’06 where we saw Ankit Fadia. Pragyan’07 saw some real good speakers - Jimmy Wales, Dilip Chhabria, Sivathanu Pillai, Guruswamy Ravichandran and some Nobel Laureates too!

We slept in the auditorium, I was roaming in my 3/4ths during Rudolf Marcus’s lecture and we were an awesome team. There is so much to recall about Pragyan Guestlectures - I’ll save it for some other post(hopefully). Have a look at the Pragyan’07 pics.

Crowd listening to Jimmy Wales

This time, the pragyangl(as we call it) has done an nice job. First - Noam Chomsky. I was literally jumping when Vijayprakash told me that Noam Chomsky has accepted to talk at Pragyan. If you are near Trichy (or anywhere in Tamilnadu) - don’t miss his lecture. Next, Philip Lebrun - the head of CERN’s LHC. We approached him last year, and he accepted to talk this time.yay!(yes, He is coming down to Trichy). And, Mark Shuttleworth - Ubuntu’s founder and first space tourist is speaking at Pragyan.

More importantly, there is an alumni panel - moderated by Sidin Vadukut. And big list of speakrs - all listed here

Ok, now - Pengufest! GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy started by Vijaykumar was almost dead(to the public) after he left college. After a long time there is something happening public with Glug-T(after Hackercrackdown). It is going to be an install fest - as Taggy says. Besides install fest, there will be some talks as well.

See you at Pragyan’08. (Will I have wifi?)

PS:Hopefully, Glug-T will have a Foss Conference soon(But, please not between September and March. There are too many foss conferences during that time)

There are quite lot of people who blog from my college NIT Trichy. Some do it regularly while others like do it very rarely. With famous bloggers like Sidin Vadukut to tech bloggers & current students like Taggy , Hari to people like Sundar who gets his blog article published in Bangalore Mirror, there is a lot of talent which remains hidden. They blog often about NIT Trichy, but hardly being noticed. And NIT Trichy Alumni network isn’t much impressive.

Surendran and Taggy came up with the idea of starting a Blog Planet which could aggregate the posts of all Nit Trichy current students and alumni. With this, they registered the domain www.nittians.com and also put up the blog aggregation. Awesome work guys! This is going to really help NIT Trichy students in the longer run.

And, yours truly is also listed in the planet .

Also, there is a group for NIT Trichy bloggers. If you blog and you are from NIT/REC Trichy, go register in the group put your blog name in the list of blogs and have your blog also listed in the Planet. If you are an alumnus or you own a company who could sponsor to host this domain, Taggy would be really happy!

What am I looking for next? - A nice blog button, that I can put in my blog. And if something really more I need, I would love to see something on the lines of django people - simple-yet-powerful. (RECAL site could have a maps mashup, hmm)

See what taggy has to say about it.
Update: Sidin is being listed in NITtians.com!

Thanks to pongi, here is the convocation video

Some more photos here (from Vishal)

Yeah, that is how our degrees were distributed last week. We had Former President Dr.Abdul Kalam as our Chief Guest. Our college website said,

“Since the duration of the Convocation is restricted to 1:30 hours due to the limited time of the Chief Guest, only Ph.D. graduates and Gold medalist will receive their Degree / Certificates on the Dias.Others will receive their degrees where they are seated, from the concerned faculty in-charge. Cooperation is requested from everyone.”

Everyone was frustrated. Everyone spammed & kept discussing in orkut groups, but who can change the administration’s decision? Even the deans weren’t happy about this.The administration was also helpless. They had to open and close the convocation in the presence of the Chief Guest, and Kalam had only 2 Hours of time. They could have called some other Chief Guest, but who can let Kalam go Here are some photos :

Ok, if you still have problem imagining the situation there, you can correlate it with the selling of murukku and vadai in a Touring talkies. Dr.Kalam’s speech about linking rivers and water resources was quite irrelevant to the situation. Read the entire speech here, if you are interested. On a surprising note, the whole convocation was live-webcasted! People who missed it, could still see it here. Is it possible to convert it into a youtube video?

And btw, I got graduated! I’m a B.Tech now