Saturday, December 23, 2006

Scientific Foresight 2006 - Day 1

Hi All,

While a majority of world population is busy celebrating Christmas,a lot of young technology enthusiast had a chance to witness one of the most valuable scientific event of the year at Patna. Here is the highlights of Day 1 of Scientific Foresight 2006:

- We had more than 700 participants on Day 1 of the Event.
- The event was Inaugurated by Dr Anil Kumar S & T minister, Govt of Bihar.
- Function started Right on scheduled Time at 10.00AM
- Good contribution on presentation.
- The participants were enthusiastic about the event and this was evident from the presentations and the response it got from the audience.
- Total Submission exceeded 200 out of which 40 best presentations were selected for the event. Quite a few of them made it today and rest will be presented tomorrow.

There were a number of really outstanding presentations made by the eminent guests and the participants today and equally relevant presentations are slated to be presented tomorrow.

We would publish the details about these presentations as soon as we receive them from the 'The scientific fortnight' team.

We would like to congratulate all the people associated with this wonderful initiative and wish them all the best for tomorrow.

Have a good and safe holiday season.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Open Source - What is in it for Developers?

In previous post we discussed What is Available in terms of tools and technologies which is open source. Also we discussed Where the World is Heading in terms of Open Source.

But then the question comes is what does it provide to the developer community? What is in store for developers?

1. An Opportunity to Harness their Skills. This gives a chance for a developer to utilize the skill they learnt in past. This is one of the best way to keep updated with the skill set we are not using full-time.

2. An Opportunity to be part of World Class Product / Software Team. Being an Open Source developer one an submit changes / bug fixes to an already established software like My SQL, Eclipse etc. After few successful commits (submission) they do get chance to work as part of the team, which is very difficult otherwise.

3. An Opportunity to Learn new Skills. Most of the developers take up Open Source projects as a way to learn new tools, technologies etc. This way they get chance to do some live project in the new skill-set rather than doing some dummy project.

4. An Opportunity to Do Something for the World rather than for living. Most of the Open Source developers do it outside their working hours. They don't get paid for this work and they do it just because they want to do it. Its something they do as a matter of their commitment and dedication towards the developer community not driven by the salary or any other thing.

In a nutshell, Working on Open source is a passion. We developers do it not for living but for our own satisfaction. It is purely driven by our zest to do something different.

Until Next Time.. :)

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Open Source - What is Available?

At times I have to face this question as What is available in Open Source World. People who dont know much about Open source ask what kind of Softwares I can find there? Initially when it all started there were not many softwares available as Open Source but today we have whole bunch of softwares available as open source.


Operating System:
Linux : Does not need any introduction.
JNode : A Java based Operating system. This is a work in progress and once completed will run the JVM upon boot. More information can be found at http://www.jnode.org/

Office Suite:
Star Office: One of the best alternative to Clumsy MS-Office. More information can be found at http://www.staroffice.org/

Dev Tools:
Eclipse : One of the Best Java IDE available today. Check it out at http://www.eclipse.org/

Free Pascal: The Pascal Compiler for Cross-Platform development. Visit http://freepascal.org/

Lazarus: The Open Source Delphi IDE Check it out at http://www.lazarus.org/

(R)DBMS:
MySQL : One of the best RDBMS available today. Check it out at http://www.mysql.com/

Application Server:
JBoss and TomCat are two most famous Application Servers in Developer Community.

Utilities:
DVDShrink is one of the utility to copy DVDs. Check it out at http://www.dvdshrink.com/

This is not the comprehensive list of Softwares available in this world. The list is very long and there are couple of sites which has lots of Open Source projects for one to look at and start participating. One such site is SourceForge.net.

Have a good time in the World of Open Source :) There is more for you to take from here than you can carry.

Until Next Time..:)

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Scientific Foresight 2006

A group of people representing Academia and Industry in India and USA, have come together to organize a symposium called “Scientific Foresight 2006” on 23rd and 24th of December 2006 at “Indira Gandhi Science Complex – Planetarium” in Patna. More information can be found at www.scientificforesight.org.

With support from One-Bihar group (A conglomerate of like minded individuals interested in development of Bihar), this is an effort to provide an impetus to the scientific research and development activities in the state and to bring in a focus towards academic excellence. This will also provide an awareness of career options available in India and abroad to the participating students. Electronics, Computer and Information technology are the major focus areas.

This event would present a platform to the scientific community of the state, particularly senior science and technology students to put forth their ideas and innovations, who can rightly be assessed and guided by a battery of qualified and established professionals. The event calls up on scientists, academicians, researchers, and students to participate in:
  • Research Paper Presentations,
  • Project Demonstrations,
  • Poster Presentations,
  • Panel Discussions.

This event will be a landmark event and the forum will play a vital role in development of electronics, computer and Information technology related activities, and awareness among students, academia and the government.

People from outside India will be participating in presentations and question-answer sessions through real time video conferencing. The entire proceedings will be available online through Internet web casting.

The event aims at sending out a clear message about Biharis being at par with the technology know-how and its applications. The idea is to show case the capital of qualified human resources Bihar has. This aims towards generating more awareness among the academic bodies and student communities about technology domains and opportunity areas. At the same time it will be a confidence-building step for industry and investors.

People from almost all engineering and major science colleges in Bihar and Jharkhand, having Electronics or Computer science in curriculum are participating in the event.

The event has support from Hindustan Himes as media associate. IEEE and NASSCOM are likely to be joining.

Support Needed:
We need more popular participations, and right people to come forward for presentations. Please suggest popular and influential profiles in business and technology domain to be invited for talks and discussions.

We need sponsors and representatives from industry. People working in various organizations can also come in their individual capacities. This will work in inspiring faculty members and students, and help them in getting right information and approach.

We need to make it more popular so that it reaches to the right people in industry and government corridors. This will also help in improving the image of our beloved state, Bihar.

Contact:
Please forward your valuable feedbacks to scientificforesight@gmail.com or pramraj@gmail.com.

Let us join hands and make it a great success.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Open Source - Where the World is Heading?

Last week I discussed about the Why we need Open Source touching various aspects of Open-Source softwares. This week we will discuss where the world is heading to in terms of Open Source.

Recently there've been many activities in the IT Industry especially companies working on Open-Source softwares.

1. More and more Companies are moving to Open Source Softwares. There is a saying in IT Industry "Check for Open Source, Before you Build it". These days more and more companies are following this principle. They look for open source software which meets their requirement before they decide to build it.

2. Expanding Domains: Earlier Open Source were limited to utilities, components etc. But these days almost any kind of software is available as open source. At times the number of softwares are so many that one got to choose which one to go for and which one meets the requirement most. Isn't that a good thing to be :)

3. Increased Reliability: The open source softwares are more reliable these days than the Properitory softwares. The big example is more and more companies adopting MySQL database over Oracle, MS SQL Server etc. The usage of open source is not a scare anymore.

4. Adopted by big Corps: Eclipse project is adopted by IBM and they use the eclipse for their flagship product WebSphere Application Developer Studio. Eclipse project which is an open source project is funded by IBM is one of the best and most liked Java IDE today.

5. Becoming Popular Choice: It was couple of weeks back at our workplace we were discussing about a codec to stream media files over internet and we came across an Open Source software which is much more powerful than any other licensed software we evaluated. Also for all the real-time and mission critical applications we are using Unix and MySQL database in our global server network. We are not the only one. There are many companies around the globe who are looking at Open Source as their option when it comes to choosing a software.

Next week we will discuss about what is available in this open source world. Though the list is very long, I will put my best effort to give a snapshot of what is available.

Until Next Time...:)