[Workshop] Ruby on Rails & Drupal

Ocean Academy of Pondicherry is organizing a 1 day workshop on two major technologies that are hot in web today.

What are those Two hot technologies ?

1. Drupal – Drupal is an World’s No.1 Content Management System, CMS in short using which one can build their own website in a short-period of time with thousands of available Plug-ins. Drupal is Open-Source.

2. Ruby on Rails – also called as RoR is a full stack Web-framework which is also used to build Websites and Web-Applications easier and faster than you think. Ruby on Rails is trending very hot right now.

To Register for the Event, visit Ocean Academy website.

There is an Registration fee fixed for the event.

Report on Techathon 2013

” Very good, Useful event, Informative, Expected more, Keep conducting events like this often “
are some of the comments and feedback we got for the event.

There is a common misconception about Indians being non-punctual. But believe me, We are punctual. Those who have registered made to the venue sharp.

As planned, event started at 9:15 Am with the overview about the event by Prasanna Venkadesh (myself) followed by the first session.

9:20 AM: Introduction to Cloud Computing with OpenStack by Yogesh Girikumar

The presentation / talk started with very basic introduction to Cloud computing, their practical applications in real life. As time passes, it was OpenStack came into play as yogesh explained about Compute, Storage and Networking part of OpenStack software. A team of 4 from OpenDrops found this talk specifically useful as they are already into Amazon cloud and now wanted to go OpenStack. This presentation lasted for around 1hours and 25 minutes. Thanks to Yogesh for the presentation.

10:40 AM – 10:50 AM – Short Break with Snacks (Coke & Cookies with Samosa)

10:50 AM: Taking Advantage of Semantic Web by Sankaranand Balaradjou

As of today Web has evolved into important part of everyone’s life. It was Web 1.0, 2.0 and it’s time of Web 3.0 – Semantic Web. Information used for the presentation by Sankaranand was much appreciated by attendees. You can view the presentation here at Slideshare. His presentation gave an overview of What one can do with loads of data available in Web today. Facebook Graph search, Google Now, etc are used as examples with their respective videos. Personally I liked his presentation, thanks for that Sankaranand.

12:05 PM – Hands on with Python by Rampragadeesh

Aw. most of them were waiting for this particular session and yes we hope they loved the session. Session started with some scanning through basic python syntax, data structures like lists, dictionaries, etc., Then he gave the task of composing a python program to generate Fibonacci series followed by Swapping values of variables. This consumed time as we allowed attendees to write their own algorithm followed by how these things can be achieved simple in terms of python. Just to show case the power of python. To demonstrate a more useful practical application using python, Rampragadeesh opened up his own python script for scrapping websites in which he explained about how to scrap a web-site using scrapping libraries available for Python along with BeautifulSoup. Hope this session would kindled an interest towards learning python for new-comers.

1:15 PM – It’s Climax

We know there is something sitting inside everyone’s stomach waiting for food. A few videos about Linux were played and finally it was networking session (getting to know each other before they leave).

Students from various Institutions like Pondicherry University, Rajiv Gandhi Engineering College, Christ College of Engineering, Sri Manakular Vinayar Engineering College, Kanchi Mamunivar, University of Engineering – Villupuram. Professionals from OpenDrops have also come as a team.

As a team, we enjoyed this day a lot with lot of people around us, came with interest and to have fun on a restful Sunday. Thank you all. I also wanted to thank Pradhip kumar, Sithanandhan, Karthikeyan and of-course Karthik Balaram – Founder, Ocean Academy, the venue sponsor who is supporting us for all our activities. Hope this will continue in future.

Photos are here:- http://prasanna.trovebox.com/photos/album-3/list

Techathon 2013 – Take a Ride

Hey Everyone,

We are very happy to meet you soon. Yes, we are entering into 2nd year. To celebrate this occasion with you in a event Specially for You named “ Techathon 2013 ” which will contain technical Talks / Demo / Hands-on Sessions to fall on February 3, 2013.

Venue: Ocean Software Solutions & Training, E.C.R Main Road, Lawspet, Pondy -8
Google Map:  http://goo.gl/maps/2fWpP

Time:- 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM (includes breaks for refreshment)
Registration Fee: Free (Only Limited seats, Register soon and confirm your seat)
Registration Form: Closed.

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Talk / Demo 1 - OpenStack

The next generation of Computing – Cloud Computing has already kicked off. Dropbox, Google Docs, SoundCloud, Gmail, Evernote are few famous Cloud services used daily.

OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing project that is free open source software released under the terms of the Apache License. More than 150 companies have joined the project among which are AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, NEC, VMware and Yahoo!- Wikipedia

Heard the term ‘ Cloud Computing ‘ and wanted to know more about it? This talk is going to be interesting for Beginners !

About the Speaker
Yogesh is a Free Software enthusiast with 3+ years of experience/exposure in Free Software, Free Hardware and Open Standards and specifications. He has been a contributor to several open-source projects primarily in terms of localization and documentation. He has been dabbling with cloud computing for over 3 years and has got a good insight about the internal workings of the cloud as well as the business dynamics of it.

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Talk / Demo 2 – Taking Advantage of Semantic Web

This presentation is about using the Semantic Web as a platform to leverage your business and business idea with advanced software and data solutions, information capabilities and analytics available in web.

About the Speaker
Sankaranand Balaradjou, Project Manager, Innergys.

He is a Web Strategist & Developer with an engineering in Information Technology. He specializes in creating Strategy for Web, developing customized websites for businesses and also blog on technology and life.

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Hands-On – Let Us Build using Python

Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we’re looking for more people with skills in this language. – Peter Norvig, Google

About the Programmer

Rampragadeesh is a serious adventure lover, a tech enthusiast and a passionate coder. He is always into learning new stuffs and trying them out. Few of his keen Interests are Machine Learning; Process Automation and Cloud Computing. He loves to meet like-minded people, So what are you waiting for? Catch him and build something using Python in just few minutes.

Note:- You need to bring your Laptop for this Hands-On session, Because you are going to build something yourself using Python in few minutes. You can also share your Laptop with friends if you don’t have. Make sure you have Python V 2.7 installed in it. Linux users, Python comes by default.

It’s 2 for us !

Hi everyone,

We are excited to inform you all that PuduvaiLUG is turning ‘ 2 ‘ this January. It’s also a new year for us. PuduvaiLUG was started back in January 31, 2011. By the end of this January, 2103, we are celebrating the 2nd Anniversary or Birthday (whatever you Name it).

We have plans to celebrate the day, so that it would be useful for you all.

Announcement would be made soon. Thank You.

PuduvaiLUG – 2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 16,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

What is Git ?

Git – Overview

Git is a open-source software which is also called as Distributed Version Control System (VCS). It is developed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux kernel for maintaining each and every version of Linux itself. Git belongs to the 3rd Generation of Version control systems. Generation of version control systems are classified as based on the type of networking (i.e 1st generation had no networking, 2nd generation has centralized networking while 3rd generation has distributed networking). Since 3rd generation has distributed networking, Git is called as Distributed Version Control System.

Why I have chosen Git for this post ?

Git is not the only Version Control Software available today. There are number of other Software exists too like Subversion (used by google code projects), Mercurial (used by Mozilla Firefox), Bazaar (used by Ubuntu developers), Veracity. The reason for choosing git to write this post is Git has become more popular as a 3rd generation VCS (may be due to the Linux kernel being popular or because of Linus Torvalds being popular or even because of Github.com and moreover I am a git user).

What is Version Control System ?

What does a Version Control System mean? We are using variety of Software everyday. Let us consider “Mozilla Firefox” as an example to learn about VCS. Can you check what version of Firefox you are using now?
To do that Open Firefox -> Help Menu -> About Firefox. I am using Firefox 17.

About Firefox Window

You might be using some other version of Firefox. I remember when I started using Firefox, it was Firefox version 3 and now today am using version 17. Firefox has come a long-way evolving into one of the best, fast and secured browser of today. With every new version, Bugs (errors) with previous versions are fixed, new features are introduced. Firefox being Open-source project, there are lot of people around the world involved in coding firefox to make it better. So when more than 1 person is handling the same code of firefox around the world, now arises a problem of consistency i.e Person A is modifying the code, at the same time Person B is also modifying the code and so on, if that is the case the Modified code of Person A is different from the Modified code of Person B. Managing these modifications to maintain the code of Firefox without any confusion is called Maintaining the Consistency and this is the job of Version Control Systems.

Who are using Git ?

Git is used by huge number of organizations and Individuals, out of which Google, Facebook, Qt, Microsoft, Twitter, Android, Linux, Gnome, KDE, Rails, Xcode, LinkedIn, Eclipse IDE are notable. No matter git has proved to evolve into being one of the best DVCS of today.

Installing Git

To Install Git in Debian / Ubuntu / LinuxMint or their derivatives

sudo apt-get install git

To Install Git in Redhat / Fedora / CentOS or their derivatives

sudo yum install git

Git is a Command-line tool, even though there are some software for using git via GUI, they are not as flexible as using git via command line. I highly recommend you to start using git via command-line.

To know more about Git, below are the following resources:-

1. Git Website – Highly recommended for beginners
2. Git – Wikipedia
3. Github.com

Few things that we did – Infographic timeline

PuduvaiLUG was founded in the year 2011. This Post is to show few Milestones we achieved along with few Activities that we have done

It is almost going to be 2 years since PuduvaiLUG was founded back in 2011 by Volunteered Youth’s of Pondicherry to spread the awareness on the usage of Gnu/Linux Operating Systems and to create an interest about Open Source development methodologies in students by explaining the concepts of Free Software, encouraging students to use, learn and contribute to Open Source projects.

List of Activities in the above Infographic Timeline

• Founded in January 31, 2011 by Volunteered Youth of Pondicherry.
• Encouraged to Start and Inaugurated Villupuram Linux Users Group (http://villupuramlug.wordpress.com)
• Celebrated Software Freedom Day 2011 with ILUG-C at MIT, Chennai.
• Celebrated 1st Anniversary of PuduvaiLUG – January 2012.
• Organized for the visit of Richard Mathew Stallman visit at IIT-Madras with FSFTN and ILUGC.
• Conducted a 1 day workshop on Network Simulator – 02 in Puducherry (Thanks to Mr. Suresh Kumar & Ocean Academy for resources).
• News about us was published in OMG Ubuntu site for powering an Internet Cafe at Puducherry by Ubuntu.
• Celebrated Software Freedom Day 2012 for the 1st time at Puducherry. 15 stalls, 45 volunteered participants, 300 public visitors. (Thanks to all Volunteers, stall members, public visitors, Pondicherry Science Forum).

The above Info-graphic was designed using Inkscape & Pencil. Most of you might have already known about Inkscape tool, Pencil is an Open-Source, cross-platform, Mock-up tool built on top of Mozilla technologies.

10/11/12

 Most of you might have noticed, some of you might have missed it. Centuries back our ancestors designed the Gregorian Calendar – the calendar that we use today for our daily life to track the number of days. This is not the first time we are seeing this Sequential date, but previously like

01/02/03, 02/03/04, 03/04/05, 04/05/06, 05/06/07, 06/07/08, 07/08/09, 08/09/10, 09/10/11 and now 10/11/12

You can see a Cow thinking about the date in the Gnu/Linux Terminal that looks fancy. Yeah. Terminal is not only about text and commands, you can make it display some fancy things. Cowsay is such an application. You can install cowsay like below:

Ubuntu – sudo apt-get install cowsay
Fedora – sudo yum install cowsay

Once installed, you can provide your own custom text to make the Cow to say or think as shown in the above picture. Example:- cowsay -w “Am looking at you” . Similarly you can replace cowsay with cowthink to make cow think instead of saying.

You can change the eyes, show tongue of the Cow. To know more use ” cowsay –help “.

Uses of such fancy applications- You can embed these applications into the program that you develop in Python / Ruby / Perl / C / Java to display some output like the cowsay or cowthink instead of just displaying output as a text. Make the cow-thinks your name in your terminal

whoami | cowthink -w

Now we know what the Cow thinks Enjoy this Sequential Day

A Report on Software Freedom Day 2012

Brief Note

Software Freedom Day which is celebrated worldwide every year was successfully conducted in Petit Seminaire Hr. Sec. School, Puducherry on September 16th of 2012. The SFD was organized by Puducherry Linux Users Group(PuduvaiLUG) along with Pondicherry Science Forum. Members from Indian Linux Users Group Chennai (ILUGC) and Free Software Foundation Movement Tamil Nadu(FSFTN) with their presence provided a great support for the event.

Our Wiki-page:- http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2012/India/Puducherry/PuduvaiLUG

Students, Volunteers, Professionals from various organizations came together to spread the word on Free Software.
They displayed stalls on various Free Software available and shared their knowledge with public people.

Theme of the Event

The main theme of the event was to show people what free and open source software means, the need for using them and the benefits to the people. To take the idea of free and open source softwares to the people various stalls were arranged. The stalls were arranged in such a way starting from the philosophy of free and open source which explained about the history of free and open source movement and need for it. Next, the stall on Wikipedia greatly provided an insight on why people should begin using free and open source tools.

What we did ?

In the coming stalls students and professionals displayed various free and open source tools based on different categories, for example,

Developer tools
1. Python
2. Web development tools like PHP

Multimedia tools
1.Blender
2. VLC

Astronomy tools
Stellarium

Engineering tools
Arduino and much more.

Business tools
Diskeless Client systems using Ubuntu and other tools from Blue Light Open Source Solutions – Aurovile.

Every stall gave a brief and simple explanation on the tools which provided the people a basic idea about Free and Open Source Software. Various GNU/Linux distro(s) were provided to the people who requested it through pen drive and books on python were also displayed. In the closing session of the event a small technical talk given by veterans in Free and Open Source Software gave an in depth knowledge and the true purpose of turning towards free and open source softwares. The first ever SFD event in Puducherry proved to be successful with the tireless efforts of PudvaiLUG and its members. Thanks to all Sponsors, Stall exhibitors, Volunteers, Stall Visitors and media for making this event a great start at Pondicherry.

At the end of the event Ubuntu Stickers were distributed to stall exhibitors.

Press News & Media

News covered in Newspapers (Dinamalar) and Tv Channel (AMN TV)

Pics & Clicks

http://prasanna.openphoto.me/photos/album-1/list

Note: Certificates for students who exhibited stalls will be provided soon.

SFD 2012 – Poster

Click to get full size

 ”The Use of Free Software on a large scale will bring the benefits of information technology to more people ” – Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Software Freedom Day 2012 – 1st time at Puducherry organized by PuduvaiLUG and Pondicherry Science Forum to be held on September 16th, 2012 (Sunday) at Petit Seminaire Higher Secondary School – Main Campus (Primary Gate), M.G. Road, Puducherry. This event is to create awareness on Free Software and Open Source. Entry Free for all. Come visit the stalls and gain knowledge.

” If you have a cup of Coffee and you share it, it becomes half, If you have Knowledge and share it, it doubles and grows exponentially “