Manish’s Scribble Board

Lots of developments have been going on of late. I dont even have time to blog on any of them. It has been a daily routine to leave room in the morning and return back around 11PM to sleep. Some of the most interesting events are MobiVision workshop, Rock’s placement, Rock On, RH MIT Campus Placement. Let me start one after another

MobiVision Workshop:

Its a special event in itself,only a few colleges in India have this kind of event. Its more into Mobile Programming. The two platforms being taught are Python on Symbian and Android from Google. The first day the turnout was more than 240 combining both the rooms. One room had Symbian lectures and other had Android. The Symbian part was a bit easy as python is a scripting language wheras Android is on Java which is complied language. The layout is to be designed through XML which is something quite tough to teach first timers. Three days have passed and hope this enthu is alive.

Rock’s Placement:

One of the most happening event of late. Our own Ankur Bansal got placed in CSC with a nice package. This was one of the most relieved moment as many of us were sceptial about his future. CSC made a heart winning announcement to pick up all 17 students who were shortlisted for interview.

Rock On:

One of the most exciting and awaited movie at this time. We had our PeP test on 31st and then headed straight to Aashirvaad theatre at Udupi. The hall is not A/C and it was really a tough job to sit for more than 2 hours in such a stuffy place. We watched the whole movie sweating and sweating. The movie was quite slow but awesome. Arjun Rampal’s acting as a failed guitarist stole the show. Kudos to Shankar Ehsaan Loy for their mind blowing music. All its music tracks are always on my lips

RH MIT Placement:

Racked Hosting visited MIT on 30th of August for posts of Designers, System Administrators and PHP Coders. The nearby college NMAMIT or more famously NITTE were also invited for the placement. The results were really depressing, such a horrible performance. They did return back without a single selection though two people did perform well, but still not considered upto the mark.

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.