Mar 2 2013

OPen Source Orientation

The first program conducted by the new committee was held in the E-ONE convention center on 26th February 2013,between 4-5 pm.The session was conducted with the intention of giving a breakthrough to the freshers to the world of open source.
The attempt was to ignite the spark triggered by the spirit of open source to the fresh minds of the eager s1s2 students of NSSCE.And the attempt was a success indeed.
The session was handled by Shafeeq,the gem we have discovered from our s1s2 class.The talk was simply brilliant.He elaborated on the technical as well as the ethical side of open source through genuine and real life examples.
The session was presided by Maya Mam,Jeevan Sir as well as Sajith Sir.The enthusiasm and inspiration instilled by them,despite some of them being from other departments was truly a great boost to our morale.
And we can never forget the endless support we received from our seniors,who attended the session and gave us helpful inputs which are to guide us through.

By abacus • Blog • 1

Jul 23 2012

The Cloud comes to ABACUS!!

ABACUS was host to Eucalyptus’ Benno for a session on Cloud Computing. Mr. Benno is one of the four representatives for Eucalyptus in India.( Eucalyptus is a California based company that undertakes open source cloud projects)

The session kicked off with an introduction to virtualization, the core concept behind Cloud Computing. We were treated to a detailed presentation on the various virtualization options and their respective architectures which was all explained in a very easy manner by Mr. Benno. This topic received very enthusiastic response from us in the form of numerous queries and doubts which were all cleared by Mr. Benno.

The afternoon had Mr. Benno taking a highly informative and highly detailed session on the starting steps for cloud computing and how the emergence of the cloud has drastically changed the scenario for start-ups looking for easy infrastructure. The cloud has also addressed the need for a portable and easily accessible storage space for many individuals and companies. He stressed on the various aspects that needed to be recognized and taken care of while developing cloud ready applications and emphasized on how the cloud was a next-gen tech that one should be able to incorporate even in traditional applications. Though Mr. Benno wanted to give a live demo on setting up a cloud, time constraints did not allow for it.

The seminar ended with Mr. Benno telling us how we could be part of Eucalyptus’ cloud through a number of projects that address various issues in cloud computing.

The program was a huge success with 45+ students across the 3 batches attending. We are hoping to continue this program of knowledge dissemination in our college and NOT stop even though we do not have enough support.

Be a part of ABACUS, be a part of change in the college.

By abacus • Blog • 1

Apr 5 2012

ARoC on Roll!

Deeply inspired by Google Summer of Code, ABACUS is proud to present its own take of the event by the name of…

ARoC, the Abacus Reign of Code!

Taking into consideration the upcoming vacation for both the S4 and S6 students, Abacus comes forward with a month of coding. The idea is to couple one student from S4 and another from S6 to make a coding pair. One such pair will be assigned a mentor who will guide them through the development of an entire application within the span of one month.

The programme officially starts on April 5th 2012 and ends on May 10th 2012.

Congratulations to the following students who got accepted for this year’s programme on the basis of interviews conducted for them.

From S4

1. Suhaira

2. Anjana

3. Aathira

From S6

4. Aparna

5. Ranjith

6. Sruthi

————————————————————

We have currently three mentors and as such we could accommodate only three pairs of students this year. The following are the mentors, their projects and the students assigned to them.

1. Mr. Anand Chitipothu :

Anand is a freelancer working currently for the Internet Archive (http://archive.org)
and is extremely interested in training young minds to learn the true spirit of coding
as well as to help them explore new horizons.

Project

eBook Library

Internet Archive has a very nice book reader software that lets you
flip through pages.

http://www.archive.org/stream/opticksortreatisnewt

So the idea of the project is to develop a web based system that will take PDFs and
convert it into a format suitable for the bookreader. It would also need an admin
interface to upload PDFs, add/edit book metadata like title, authors, tags etc.

It is basically to be implemented using Python and Javascript code.

Students

Aparna and Suhaira.

2. Mr Ershad K.

Ershad is free software enthusiast as well as a keen programmer. Absolutely curious
about anything new that he can find, he finds pleasure in teaching what all he knows
to others.

Project

A twitter like system to share mini posts and contents inside
college. To be implemented using Ruby on Rails.

Students

Ranjith and Anjana.

By Haris Ibrahim K. V. • Blog • 0

Mar 24 2012

Abacus on github!

ABACUS has started a pet open source project on github. You can find it at github.com/allforabacus . Within the repository called ‘projectc’, you can find a README file which contains all the information regarding the project. If you have more doubts after reading that, ask them on our mailing list at allforabacus@googlegroups.com.

Happy hacking!

By Haris Ibrahim K. V. • Blog • 0

Jan 24 2012

Command line foo

On 21st January, ABACUS organized a class on Shell Scripting intented
mainly for s4 students.

Ershad, who has always inspired us , put together some topics, some of the
very interesting things to do with shell scripting . Even though most of
the attendees had little exposure to linux OS, he gave a lucid explanation
of the power of linux.

An introduction to basic terminal commands was given first.
Almost all of us are less aware that a command line interface is faster and
more powerful. And it seems, getting started with command line interface is
not that interesting for an inexperienced user. But the kind of topics he
chose for the talk gave a fillip to all the novice linux users.

Advantage of using VIM editor were nicely & clearly delivered by him
citing good examples. He gave us an idea of Cryptography which is used for
hacking. SSH (Secure Shell Host) provide secure network services between
two or more networked computers. He demonstrated some operations performed
by shell scripts like file manipulation, program execution, and printing
text. In addition to that we were introduced to amazing things which can be
performed using terminal:
-playing mp3 songs
-accesing internet & performing google search
-sending & reading mails
-downloading web pages

In spite of his busy schedule Ershad found time to help understand about
‘vinagre’ which is used to control networked computers using Remote Desktop
technology and ‘scp’ which is a tool used to send files to networked
computers.

By abacus • Blog • 0

Jan 9 2012

webCon 2012!

On 7th January 2012, ABACUS came forth with one full day conference, webCon!

We were blessed by three eminent personalities for the event.
Mr. Santhosh Thottingal, who was the keynote speaker for the event.
Mr. Ershad K., who invited the freshers into the amazing world of computing and freedom.
Mr. Ranjith Mohan, one among the founders of ‘freekz’, the predecessor of ABACUS.

We could not have done it without the presence of Viji ma’am, the staff-in-charge and guide of ABACUS.

We had 6 paper presentations.

1. Sreejith (S6CSE) : A brief introduction to HTML, CSS and Javascript.
2. Aravind (S6CSE) : Setting up PHP and an introduction into its coding.
3. Aparna (S6CSE) : Web-architecture. How it all works.
4. Devi (S6CSE) : Photoshop and its HTML embedding.
5. Ajith (S8CSE) : JSP and Servlets with a demo.
6. Ershad K. : Web hosting.

There was a special ending ceremony by Shabeeb of S8EEE with his amazing skill on the piano.

And a special thanks to Jijo (S6CSE) for anchoring the entire conference in his cool and jovial attitude.

The event kicked off at 9.30 in the morning with a small intro and then getting into the keynote speech. Santhosh came forward with his entirely informal and friendly attitude and started his talk.
We all felt really strange because there was something that we had all taken for granted when hearing about Stallman, Linus and other great people who brought about amazing changes in the world. And the thing that was that each and every knowledge that we had acquired through reading and hearing was in English! We hadn’t even in our dreams think that our own identity, our own mother tongue would have any importance for us while learning technology and computers. But in the first few seconds of his talk, we realized that our identity was precious.
We had forgotten that there were people among us who held true to their mother tongue, Malayalam, and as such how could it be justified the technology and use of computers being denied to them just on the basis of not knowing another language? Fortunately, a certain group of people had realized this and they were working their heart out for bringing the local languages to life on screens. And we now know that Santhosh is one among that dedicated sincere group.
He took us through how the complexities of Malayalam language put forth a lot of restrictions in its implementation on screen. We even saw letters that we had never seen in our lives before! Shamefully we had to admit that we were Keralites who didn’t know Malayalam and the arrogance and pride of “not knowing to read or write Malayalam” was given a really good blow.
He showed us how each and every letters were drawn scaled to the very fine detail. There were even people dedicated to drawing the letters and letting the developers use them for the font rendering! And in short, in a few short minutes, we were exposed to a pretty huge world out there that we had no idea about.
Our wild guesses of 1000 and 10000 of the number of developers of one among the top 5 websites of the world were proved so very entirely wrong with his answer of 85! Now we know that a few people can make wonders in the world.
However, a small set back happened with the organizing committee of the event when due to the power failure for half an hour, Santhosh was not able to demonstrate his work. As such ending his talk after a few questions from the audience, we expect him to be back soon with us for a wonderful demonstration of his work.

At 11.00, the conference was shifted into parallel tracks where the paper presentations were conducted from the eOne hall and talk for the first year students was conducted from the eOne hall.

At the auditorium, Ershad caught the first years just like a sly fox catching a chicken. Even though the description does seem strange, it was exactly like that where the session was entirely interactive. The alien words of Free software, open source, ubuntu, Debian, RMS, Linus, etc were made familiar to them through an excitingly funny and entertaining way. Again showing us what is the true meaning of teaching. His example of buying a cycle and the shopkeeper imposing restrictions on the buyer really got through to the fresh and intelligent brains of the youngsters and by the end of the talk, everyone was enthusiastically looking forward to being a part of the open source and free software world.

Meanwhile, Sreejith gave a wonderful insight to us on HTML, CSS and Javascript with his talk. Those who thought that web pages were only for the experts understood that it was not so and that any of them could give it a shot. His amazing presentation was followed by Aravind.
Aravind presented his paper on introduction to php, setting it up and coding in it with a small demo. Having learnt front end designing already, Aravind completed the picture with his back end server side scripting class. After his excellent talk, the morning session was concluded at about 12.45.

The conference resumed at 1.30 with Aparna coming forward with her paper on web architecture. Having learned how to create a web app from the first two talks, Aparna cleared everyone’s doubt of so as to how the web app worked over the Internet. After her talk, the audience had a really good framework of what was happening from typing an address in the address bar till the page getting loaded.
Devi carried on with her entertaining talk on Photoshop and how it was used to get pictures onto the web. She even went to the extent of showing us how to turn a guy’s black coat into bright red after beautifying his old black and white photo!

By this time, Mr. Ranjith had reached the venue and he was welcomed for a few words with us. He talked about he came to know about ABACUS. He shared with us the story of how he got a mail titled “freekz 2.0″ from one his friends with a link to ABACUS’ site a few months ago. He shared his experiences in TCS and how freekz came to be with us.

After that, Ajith came forward with his talk on JSP and servlets. The need for JSP, a few basic syntaxes and finally getting into a demo that showed how to use both the tools.
The final talk was by Ershad where he gave a quick idea on how domain name registration and web hosting could be done. A very brief idea on how to setup an entire website was only complete with his presentation.

Before concluding webCon, there was a special guest appearance by Shabeeb where he entertained us for ten minutes with his wonderful skill at Piano.

The program was concluded at 4.15 bringing webCon 2012 to an end.

However, the lack of attendance really showed and as such, many just wanted the name to be there in their resumes but were not ready to co-operate to take forward the initiative. Expecting the careless attitude to change overtime, we are all looking forward to next year’s webCon!

All hail ABACUS!

By abacus • Blog •

Dec 23 2011

Workshop on Play! and BeagleBone

On December 20th 2011, ABACUS organized a mini project guidance class for the S6 Computer Science students. Making a long standing wish come true, we were blessed by Pramode sir’s presence at our college where he did a brilliant demonstration and hands on session of the exciting new Play! framework. Starting from the very basics of setting it up to interfacing it with the BeagleBone, he went through the internal workings of the framework.

In his own words, we were honored by “The very first Play! and BeagleBone workshop in South India”.

Discouraging the idea of doing the projects from firms by spending thousands of rupees and learning nothing, he successfully motivated the students into doing their own projects however small it was. He stressed upon the point of finding the usefulness of doing the project by ourselves once we get out of campus and seek for a job.

Although the students found it a bit tough to cope with the command line usage, they overcame their troubles and tested the experiments at least once then and there itself.

Instead of just explaining the framework, Pramode sir explained the idea of how the Internet worked. This was an enlightening knowledge to the students as they finally figured out what was really happening behind the scene. Even though the interaction was a bit low, the students were pampered by Pramode sir’s frank, informal and friendly attitude. Almost all of them enjoyed being there.

And here is to Pramode sir who spent a dedicated long four and a half hours with us without even showing the slightest hint of tiredness. He was full of energy till the end and he made sure the students didn’t feel bored.

At the end, after winding up the workshop at 4.30, he discussed various project ideas with the students. He gave them lots of potential ideas and has surely left them thinking for good.

A hearty thanks to Pramode sir for spending such a long time with us and also for sharing with us a significant part of his knowledge.

All hail ABACUS!

By abacus • Blog • 0

Sep 24 2011

A nice time with Pramode sir.

Pramode sir, a freelancer and teacher near GEC Trichur agreed to introduce a handful of Abacus members to basic Python coding and its applications demonstrating a few tricks with embedded systems programming.

A very friendly person by nature he got through to us. His informal attitude and wise words conveyed the message of breaking away from the constraints of curriculum and exploring the world out there. “Pottakkinatile thavala”, in his own words.

Joining a community and getting to know resourceful people are key factors in exploring your unlimited potential. The lack of exposure to people and events related to FOSS happening around the world is really a huge drawback for us, the students of NSSCE. I believe at least with one or two, that is beginning to change.

There are examples of students at GEC who sacrificed whole of their sem exams to participate in Google Summer of Code. What did they gain, you ask? While the so called “mark scorers” studied and with 85% and 90% went and joined under rated companies (at least inside even if the outside is polished), these guys who sacrificed got google’s certificate and 250000 rupees for three month’s work. You think and see for yourself which is more beneficial.

These are a few of the ideas that we gained from Pramode sir. He has put together a mailing list to help us and you can find it here.

Hoping he will come and spare sometime with us at our college in the future.

All hail Abacus!

List of Students Participated in Python + Embedded systems Workshop:

• S7CSE

1. Sharat A.

2. Rahul Raj

3. Sunil Hari

4. Haris Ibrahim K. V.

• S5CSE

5. Anand Krishnan R.

6. Nidin Lal

7. Jibin George

8. Ajay Kumar

9. Sruthi M.

10. Sreelekshmi

11. Aliya Das

• S3CSE

12. Anoop S. Nair

13. Anirudh S. Menon

14. Ajumal P. A.

15. Harikrishnan C.

By abacus • Blog • 0

Sep 18 2011

Software Freedom Day, the hackBorns!

Abacus is proud to present the hackBorns! Please visit our gallery to see the hackBorn family.

We held up the spirit of software freedom day on the 17th of September, 2011, by starting off with a superb class by Anuraj sir of our CSE department on a brief history of how FOSS came to be, followed by a Linux familiarization/installation demo.

Starting the programme at 9:00am, he walked us through how the Free Software Movement (FSM. Hey! That stands for Finite State Machine too! Cool.) was initiated by Richard Stallman and what the actual meaning of freedom was. An introduction of the GNU project and how Linus Torvalds came into the picture by bringing the missing piece of the puzzle, the Linux kernel, were are all discussed.

Following the philosophy, the 30 attendees were given a familiarization into using GNU/Linux. More specifically, we were using Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx for the demo. Launching applications, the file system layout, installation of softwares, etc were demonstrated. It was then time for the installation demo, the final piece of the first session!

Anuraj sir booted one of the systems with a USB and gave demo on running the live version plus the usage of Gparted (an ultra cool partitioning software) and then went into the actual installation part. The manual hard disk partitioning, selection of the file system type, extended and primary partitions were all discussed and the session was concluded by him taking everyone into a 100% completion of Ubuntu installation.

Now it was time for Ershad.

His session was on what he demonstrated for our last event. Downloading an open source project, using automake tools to install it, changing the source code (Birth of Hacking for the attendees!) and viewing that change. Once the hands on session with that was over, he gave a small presentation on using git. Nothing too much theoretical. A brief introduction and then got into its hands on session. Initializing git, getting it to track, viewing the changes, switching back to an old copy of the development, etc were covered and the session ended with him laying out a beginning for the sequel! “Now there is something called github, but next time for that…”, he said at last!

Piqued with curiosity, the hackBorn family is eagerly waiting for more! We witnessed a new bunch of Stallman/Linus followers being born on our software freedom day celebration.

Here is to the future!

All hail Abacus!

PS: The following are the list of attendees:

S3CSE

1. Harikrishnan C.
2. Ajumal P. A.
3. Rahul K.
4. Anirudh P. Menon
5. Gorbin Philip.

S5CSE

6. Neesa M. Kadavul
7. Athena M.
8. Amrutha Murali.
9. Akhitha P. Lawrance
10. Sreelakshmi S.
11. Aparna R.
12. Aliya Das
13. Sruthi M.
14. Mekha S.
15. Devi V. Kumar
16. Aravind N.
17. Kiran P.
18. Akhil Krishnan P.
19. Ashik Salman P.
20. Lal Krishna Raj
21. Anand Krishnan
22. Sangeeth E. V.
23. Madhu K. S.
24. Hari Krishnan P. K.
25. Nidin Lal.
26. Ajay Kumar P. C.

S5ECA

27. Ebin

S7CSE

28. Praseetha K. R.
29. Haris Ibrahim K. V. (Simply walking around)
30. Manu Mohan (Trying to help?)
31. Sharat M. R. (Troubleshooter!)

By abacus • Blog • 1

Aug 29 2011

Show Off Abacus

A presentation programme for the members was held on 20th August.
Ershad of PISAT college, Palakkad was invited for a talk on Open source and a few small demonstrations. He did a beautiful presentation and inspired and motivated all to go into open source.

The programme started at 10 in the morning with Ershad’s talk. After his miracle, Shihabudheen of S7CSE was honoured with a small token of appreciation for his valiant deed of saving a life.
It was followed by Jijo’s speech on Indian independence.
Trivia questions related to computer science were asked in between and those who answered were given a small present.
Dileep soothed our hearts with his voice holding up the motto “come forward and present!”.
Poornima and Praseetha presented a paper on cloud technology.
Later on we were entertained by Varun with his impersonations.
The website was published and the mailing list was announced.
At 12 noon, Mr. Anil Kumar sir, HOD Mechanical Department shared his thoughts on survival in the wild world with us.
The programme was concluded at 12:45 with a vote of thanks by Vasudev.

Although starting off with a small audience of about 30, to the end nearly 100 were present who enjoyed and learned a lot.

Here is to the future.

By abacus • Blog • 0