Views, News and Cheers!
On Tuesday, 06th March, I delivered a session on Linux Kernel Architecture at CSE department of SRKR Engineering College, Bhimavaram. The session’s goal is to introduce various subsystems of Linux Kernel and how they work together to deliver a flexible and robust operating system. Here are a few pictures from the event.
Slides used in the linux kernel session are here in the classes page.
Cheetah, world’s fastest robot till date, clocked 28.3mph on a controlled treadmill tether. This DARPA project implemented by Boston Dynamics has impressive progress in the recent past and has interesting roadmap ahead.
There are a few more interesting Robots from Boston Dynamics: Sand Flea, BigDog, etc. Check them out!
The world of publishing has gone thru considerable changes in the last couple of decades. Many publishers around the world are moving towards content generation by syndication rather than the age old “editorial reviews followed by queuing for publishing” approach. Let us see some examples:
I have seen a good number of students (especially in countries like India, where sharing content openly has a delayed start) start sharing their work on public sites, thanks to YouTube, blogger and many other tools. Facebook pages are doing quite well in the recent past in attracting focused and unmoderated technical writing by individuals.
In the midst of this change in the publishing methods, one area that is not moving fast enough in embracing unmoderated content is scientific publishing. This domain is still following the legacy “assess and publish” model rather than the “publish and assess” model that the rest of the world is drifting towards.
Michael Eisen has some interesting thoughts in this area. Worth reading.
Today we had a blast! The SRKR Engineering College Alumni Meet is a great success. About 400 alumni and 20+ faculty members attended the grand event. The event is hosted by Oakridge School and their arrangements are top notch – Multi Purpose Hall, Audio Visual Equipment, Food, Power backups, Facilities logistics and what not – every things is top quality. The event started a bit late because of delayed arrival for registrations. We had to rush thru some of the proceedings but finally made sure that every registrant captured nice moments with their classmates and friends.
NetEnrich is one of the sponsors of the event. We ran a slideshow that discusses how our industry academic interactions helped each other.
Couldn’t capture any pictures during the day’s indoor proceedings. However, here are decent number of pics from the registration and socializing phases.
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| SRKR Alumni Meet 2012 – 01 |
We have an upcoming SRKR Engineering College Alumni Meet in Hyderabad. Please register as soon as possible, to qualify for the early bird discount on registration fee.
Use the facebook page to comment/suggest/socialize the event. We also have a twitter feed for Alumni now.
See you there!
We are conducting Hyderabad edition of SRKR Engineering College Alumni Meet in February, 2012. Prof. G. V. Padmaraju helped putting together a Coordination Committee to ensure the success of the meet. Today is the first meeting of the Coordination Committee. We did the introductions and then discussed the logistics, approach and ownership for various activities.
Attendees are
SRKR Alumni, stay tuned for an exciting event!
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| SRKR-AM-CC-2011-12-29 |
For close to two and half decades of my programming life, the name Dennis Ritchie has become a synonym for simplicity, elegance, portability and efficiency.
My love for the C language started very casually and grew with time. Having been exposed to other programming languages like BASIC, Fortran and Pascal, it took me two full days to learn the syntax of the C language. But it took me several years to understand and effectively use the semantics of various aspects of the language. Once I started learning about the early C++ interpreters on Unix language and how object oriented semantics are implemented in C language (using compilers and preprocessors together), my love for the language and its innovators kept on increasing.
The journey with the Unix operating system became more of a life than love itself. Each variant or derivative of Unix I ever worked with, including HP-UX, SCO, UCB, Magnix, Linux and Solaris in particular, led to immense passion and respect towards the fundamentals behind Unix – all the qualities I attributed to Dennis in the first sentence above. These qualities are the reason why the applications and appliances built using the core and its paradigms touch us day in and day out, directly or indirectly. (For more on these qualities, read The Practice of Programming – here and here.)
Even though Dennis is no more today, his impact will still be felt for decades to come.
Quoting Dave Tong (@davetong) on twitter:
If Steve Jobs changed the world then Dennis Ritchie created it.
All I can say is a big thank you to Dennis Ritchie, for his silent yet powerful life. It changed our lives. RIP.
The month of examinations is here already. Spurthi has exams starting 07th of this month. Surya’s examinations are going to start later this month and they last till end of the month. Busy month ahead!
The Government of Andhra Pradesh dilly-dallying on the fees reimbursement got ample wrath from Supreme Court. The Respected Court rightly observed that the Government can’t go back on something that it promised for such a wide range of public.
I am personally against populist schemes that have potential to endlessly make holes to State exchequer. However, once such scheme starts implementing, the Government has no moral right to leave out the beneficiaries in the middle of nowhere. If the Government wants to take out the scheme, then it should at least continue the scheme for the current batches of students to complete their coursework and stop extending it to new batches of students.
Ideally, if the Government pays education fees for students, it should have a vision of how such expense should lead to direct or indirect revenues in the long run. Each students who gets a benefit of a lakh of rupees, say, definitely has the potential to bring in that much indirect revenue to the Government in the long run, if proper environment is created where these students can excel in their careers and bring in good economy (read pay taxes.) The Government should have a blueprint on how it can nurture such an economy and should have a plan on how it will withstand these expenses till such economy starts paying off.
In my last few months of interaction with students, majority of them from financially weaker sections, I am finding very good talent getting benefited from such schemes. If such a scheme is not there, their talent would definitely be left unpolished or would take a much more painful path to get polished. I hope Government finds a way to extend help to such rightful beneficiaries in future, yet controls huge outflows of money from treasury.
Participated in SPURTHI-11 on 03rd Feb at SRKR Engineering College, Bhimavaram. NetEnrich is platinum sponsor of the event. I did a keynote speech on how we manage anything and everything from a desktop to a cloud.
Here are the pics from the event.
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| Spurthi-11 |