Manish’s Scribble Board

Guess today’s turnout of workshop? Its was just seventeen (17) excluding me, Ankur and Anomit. Now the question crops up- “Why so less”? I asked some of the people who attended the workshop itself. The answer which i got was something which I had always thought of. They said that many of the people havnt programmed earlier and don’t ever have used any programming language in their life. Since they are doing it for the first time, they are bound the face problems. Those who were sincerely attending the workshop had previous knowledge of C/C++ programming.

One more shocking observation was that all of the attendees understood SQL and DBMS very easily. I had expected these topics to be completely greek to them since its a new thing. I had even told them in the beginning that since its a bit different thing, pay attention and ask questions if you have. SQL is not a procedural language and DBMS concepts are something new to all.

Well, something new from hostel! I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 Beta 4 version on my system making my system triple boot ( It was also earlier). The looks and feel of this new version is very promising and surely its gonna pick up very soon. Here I attach below a snapshot.

Click on it to zoom ( may take time to load, its 504 KB in size)

So just returned from Day 3 of the Web Design and Development Workshop. Today we started with the core PHP language constructs. The syntax of PHP matches very much with C/C++ and students should not have problems understanding this very simple but exhaustive, beautiful language. Yesterday I taught them about Interpreters and Compilers, the basic difference between them and their implementation, the server-client model and lots of other stuff.

Teaching using chalk and duster on the board is something very traditional and today I felt it. I switched off the projector and took the chalk to teach them about the language constructs, well what to teach? It matches C++

Ankur got some pics from his mobile camera, where you can see me explaining on the board and in the last pic sitting comfortably and giving lectures ( inspired by our OS teacher)

So finally the much hyped Web Design and Development workshop kick started today, am very much exhausted today. Though I tried my best to make the class as interesting as possible, still the topic in itself was such dull that even three people could not make it so interesting. In the middle I felt that people have started sleeping but still we cant help them if they cant help themselves.

The turnout was some 40-45, I was expecting more! Many of my third year friends didnt attend today since they know HTML, they will be turning up tomorrow for advanced HTML and getting the basics of Web Scripting. The Basics of Web Scripting includes telling how web development languages are different from desktop based languages. Telling them about interpreteres, how are they different from compilers and all those stuffs.

Well on the other side, my interview is caught badly in sessionals. We has appealed to college to just postpone the sessionals a day ahead next week, they taking a lot of time to give their decision. People had suggested me to give the interview at Mumbai this Saturday which is quite difficult as I have not prepared anything and in this present situation am sure to be rejected. Tomorrow Director will be coming out with his decision from which I dont have much hope. More updates tomorrow…

So here goes the fourth event of LUG Manipal which will make a special stamp on the history of this newly founded organization. Firstly clubs/organizations in MIT charge hefty amount of sum for attending workshops and all such events where they teach all shit.

What they teach? HTML, CSS using Dreamweaver! OMG! What is so special about it? I feel like banging my head on the wall when people fall prey to these traps. Dreamweaver is an advanced IDE and people go to attend these workshops thinking that its another new language, only to get disappointed. At max they might teach ASP for a server-side scripting even at the days of ASP.NET. All old and useless technologies of these days! Such pathetic situation.

First I want to make it clear that LUG would not take a single penny from its members for any event as registration fees or event fees. If we do anything that costs us, we gladly inform our members about the same and ask them to make their own accomodation. Here too we are organizing a Web Design and Development Workshop for all the students of Manipal. No registration is required, no charges, it all free! All that’s required is commitment.

We will be teaching Open source Web Development Technologies like LAMP/WAMP. We are hoping to give more preference to LAMP. Now question comes why PHP? Just because its one of the best scripting languages and best when it comes to Open Source web scripting language. Why MySQL? Well there is no other alternative and MySQL just rocks. If you are not satisfied better use MS SQL or Oracle if you have enough powerful hardware, PHP supports both of them. But the feel which you would get with MySQL is difficult to achieve on other database softwares. Why Apache? Its the uncrowned king of webservers. Its deployment is around 70-75% of the servers around the world. What else reason you need? Why Linux? To get the real server like feel, using file permissions, PHP and MySQL are specially optimized for running over Linux.

One more question comes into play is Why not ASP? Its not an open source technology and for me its vastly inferior to PHP, no comment on ASP.NET as I havnt used it. What buggs me most is that many people dont know about PHP and ask questions like “What is PHP? I think ASP is more powerful than PHP“. I ask them have you tried? Then how can you say this? They are dumb-struck! PHP has so many third party extendibility like hundreds of frameworks, Templating Engines, PEAR like packages and many many more. There is simply no end to this great programming language. Thanks Rasmus for your creation.

And Yeah! I forgot to mention that the poster was designed by my friend Aavik! Designing a colour poster is a bit easier than designing a black and white one. Using 8-bit grayscale is somewhat challenging and he did it.

Just returned today from Bangalore in the morning after a day long hectic trip. I had applied for the Internship at Microsoft for the year 2008 back on 5th of this month. The exam center was Sir M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology, Yalahanka, Bangalore. This place is located outside the town, but luckily the exam was on Sunday. We didnt get caught up in any traffic chaos and all those problems general to Bangalore.

Reached the center at 8 in the morning, hopefully we were one of the earliest people to arrive at the campus. The regitsrations started at 9, PPT started at 9:20AM. They informed us about the general topics, exams pattern, exam schedule and their future prospects.

We were led to the exam rooms, after waiting for one and a half hour our exams started. The exam was total of 90 minutes with five sections- Aptitude, DS and Algo, C++,OS and RDBMS. The exams went fine, hoping for the best. The host college had arranged buses which were meant to ply over the main Bangalore bus stand. We visited some of the malls including “Forum” and caught our bus at 7PM itself. Reached Manipal at 7AM in the morning.

From the other side, I made an attempt at Zend PHP Framework for developing powerful PHP applications. Am not very much sure how much I may proceed but am hopeful that I may learn the needeful. More to come up, keep a close watch

The name says it all. LUG Manipal site is now hosted on a proper domain. Thanks to Swap ( read Swaroop Hegde) from Racked Hosting. Its the same hosting provider where my site is hosted, on a new server, a brand new one! It took some half an hour to move the old blog from my site to this new domain. I had messed up with the permalinks and the blog feeds earlier when the site had gone down for two days.

My own domain has also been moved to the new server.  LUG’s blog now has total of 7 users/authors. All have been posting on it as and when necessary. I hope we get more authors on that blog in the near future. Just authors arnt necessary, posting is more important point. We have got a lot of support from Racked Hosting, they have excellent servers with blazing fast speeds and quality DNS. We will be working with them to organize quality seminars and workshops. For more info about them goto their site http://www.rackedhosting.com

We have many more plans for LUG, this week plans are nearly final for two day workshop on Linux. This is especially for them who got Linux installed on their systems during the Install Fest. The first years have made a lot of requests for a workshop on Web Design and Development, though its possible to organize if it has some relation with Linux and Open Source. I hope we can do something over it next week. Wait and watch. Do give your ideas and feedback.