First job, first task

Hey everyone

I'm really lazy about writing anything, (that includes coding, strangely enough) and generally want to avoid such hardship. Anyways, today I'm going to talk about this program I am a part of, called "Sun Campus Ambassador". As might be apparent from the name itself, my task is to a technology evangelist for Sun Microsystems on my campus, Delhi University. Since most of Sun's products are open-source, it'd be appropriate to post about those here. And yes, I am succeeding the immensely talented and helpful Agraj Mangal on this job. You can have a look at his blog here.

Sun is the largest corporate contributor to the Open Source movement with reference to the number of lines of code contributed. I think that's the most obvious criteria, since measuring man-hours contributed would be non-trivial. If memory serves me right, IBM also claimed the same in a session I attended but what there criteria is, I am unaware.


One of the tasks I have to do as a Campus Ambassador is to deliver talks in my department on topics related to open-source software and/or Sun. In order to start off, I chose the easiest topic I could think of, "Open Source : How we already use it". (Remember how I can be lazy even about writing code? Well, I can get away with it because of Open Source Software obviously) The reason I chose this topic is that the target audience consisted of first years, all of whom did not know what open-source software is. Also, the "How we already use it" part would help me demonstrate the use of open-source software that is already taking place. I also tried to build in basics like what is a database, how the Internet works. In very simple terms ,of course.

I started off taking Orkut as an example. I know, I know, it's written in ASPX. No marks for pointing that out. But it fit the bill perfectly. Indian Internet users log on to social networking sites extensively. I could talk about databases (think personal info), servers and stuff in an obvious and intuitive manner. Also, Google has open-sourced a part of Orkut, and it was the first to do so. And if that is not enough, just think of how people forgive the "sins" of Apple and Google just because of the fantastic user experience they provide, and use that as an excuse here :D


I also tried to tie in how things are done at our department with all of this. We use Java and C++ as the primary programming languages, and both GCC and Java are of course Open Source. Then come the projects and assignments which usually involve stuff like MySQL, JSP, Tomcat, Glassfish, and Netbeans. A couple of projects also had Solaris, and J2ME. All in all, I didn't have to work hard on that part.

I also introduced the Java User Group for Delhi University and the Sun Club for the same. The Sun club was initiated by me, and isn't that active yet, but I'm sure it'll grow with time. I also tried to get a democratic approach to the sessions, but I'll blog about that some other time. (Effect from reading the book Maverick! during that time). Well, the first result of that was that my next session changed from Netbeans to an OpenSolaris session.

Well, there were pens distributed, and some refreshments were served. And yeah, the refreshments got late, so I talked about the Sun Academic Initiative and Certification impromptu. :D I had an audience of around 100. According to what I gathered, they were with me for the most part. Except maybe the institute projects part. Well, many of them were first years, so can't blame them.

Some points to improve upon:
It was pretty short. I generally tend to speak only 60% of what I intend to when I prepare for a presentation.
My speech can do without the “aaaahh”s I tend to use as for when I'm thinking of a word... Well, I'm not that good yet...
The impromptu part could've come without Agraj prompting me :D
I should've presented the various business methods behind Open Source Software

Overall it went well enough.

RSS and blogs

The second post took a while in coming. But I'm still finding my feet here, so bear with me.

I told a few friends about this blog, and told them to subscribe to the same on their RSS feed. Some of them asked me what that was... that's fair enough, it's what I'm here for. And I'll try to explain it. (RSS, btw, also refers to the Rashtriya Swayemasevak Sangh, a Hindu religious organization. I'm not talking about that, just in case. It's membership is upwards of 2 million... always surprised by that figure)

The idea is very simple. Subscribing to a newspaper used to give you access to information in the good old days. But that information came from only one source. TV channels then let you get information from a number of sources, at little increase in cost. But a lot of information was something you didn't want. (Who here loves Aaj Tak?) The Internet, of course, turned that on it's head. Now, you could choose the news you wanted to see. The trouble with that is, case you are reading your news from a news website, or a blog, you'd have to visit the page, and then find out the "new" news. Of course, you could use services that brought these news together at one place. But that's just a newspaper, isn't it :D Enter, RSS. What RSS does is, you tell an 'RSS reader' what news you want and from what source. Then, it'll bring those news down to you any time you want. So all of your news, at one place. And mind you, it'll mark out the latest news... just to save you the effort.

I'm still new to this, so, in case I've messed up my explanation, you can search on youtube for what are RSS feeds

Now, there are several ways to use these news. And, they're very easy to use. There's your web browser, for firefox, Internet Explorer 7 , and opera. There's rss readers available online, like Google Reader. It's built like gmail, so you should not have much trouble using it if you've used e-mail :D . 

The last part, of course, is how to use it. I told my friends to RSS my blog because I know they might be too lazy to check my blog regularly. As a blogger, the more people have your blog address on RSS, the better. Then we come to the technical side. An RSS feed is essentially XML in an agreed-upon format. XML lets you store your data in a human-readable format, that can be read by any machine. Those more technically minded would realize that that “any” is very important here. So, an RSS feed is just a standard that can be used to describe any new published news. Since it is standard, people the world over can write programs that use it. So do I, in fact. For PHP, I've used Magpie, and currently I'm using JSP, and Sun Microsystems has it's own tag library for that.

That should be enough to get you started on RSS.

First Post

Hello all-comers,

Ahem, after years of dodging the bullet, I'm going to start a blog after all. Let me start by an introduction. I am Aadhar Mittal from Delhi, India. Currently a post-graduate student in Computer Science. Let's see if the blog lasts long enough for me to have to revise that...

Starting this, I can't help but think back to the time when fiction and poetry used to be my all-consuming passion... Of course, this was in the days before blogs came into the picture. Now, however, my inclinations are towards technology. Actually, even my feelings on technology are conflicted. Let me put it this way, I'd much rather sing by myself, and annoy everyone around me, rather than buy an iPod. The reason I'm interested in technology is that it allows me to be creative, so if I have something I want to create, I learn the details behind it, otherwise I don't bother.

Anyways, this blog will be about Java and open-source. I'm currently dabbling into a ton of diverse stuff on this front, you'll come to know of them in time. 

Later then