Aspirations 2020

Hip!Hip!Hurray!! MEC WINS!!!

We sailed through to the State Level Finals in the Online Programming Contest conducted by the Infosys as a part of their Aspirations 2020 and finally emerged the Winners beating some of the best programmmers of Kerala (eg. students from CET, Rajagiri,etc..).
The Prize: A Trophy for the College, and a Sony PSP 3004 PB(PlayStation Portable) for each one of us.

Ya...It was a great experience...The finals was conducted at the Park Center and Bhavani Infosys Campuses, Technopark, Trivandrum...It was on March 19th.
Our team consisted of 3 members: Myself, Manu Thomas (leftmost in photo) and Suraj Shenoy (middle). Quite depressingly and ironically, only one team participated in the contest from whole MEC.


Pic: Park Center was where they conducted the events except programming....

Aspirations 2020 is being conducted for the first time in Kerala. Apart from the Programming Contest, there were other events like Paper Presentation, Distinguished Students, and Quiz. This event had been conducted through various stages, first there was the Teaser Round, then came the College round, then the Inter-College and finally the State Level Round. Unfortunately, there was no National Level Round this year. Infosys is planning to keep it from the next year.

Signing off for now...bye!!

GSoC 2009

Its by surprise that I decided to give a try at the Google Summer of Code 2009 (GSoC2009). I have now finally ended up sending a proposal to an organization. The funny part is that I am in the middle of my 6th semester university exams!!! One exam is over...5 more to go!!
The GSoC Student Proposal Submission deadline ends at 7:00 P.M GMT, April 3rd. I know as I am writing this post that its just one hour more for that deadline.
Anyway, I thought I'll spend some time blogging..... :-)

About GSoC: In the first week, I didn't spend time at all in searching for any projects....I had almost dropped the idea of participating on account of the squeezing university exam schedules. Around 2 days back, I just scanned through some organizations and their ideas...most of them were really hard for me coz I don't have enough experience with open source...
But I stumbled upon a project idea where the basic requirements were pretty ok for me. They were Linux, Bash/Perl/Ruby/Expect, Mysql. I thought I would give it a try...but it was actually yesterday that got some time to read through the ideas of the project.
Details of the project can be obtained from the link: http://wiki-oar.imag.fr/index.php/Test_Suite_Proposal.

The mentoring organization is OAR and the project I have decided to send proposal for is OAR Testsuites.

The main idea about this project is that the student has to create a framework and suites of tests to check proper functioning and installation of the OAR batch scheduler which is a resource management software that takes care of more than 5000 nodes in a cluster. Sounds really techie, right?
Did a little bit of research today morning and found out a few things that I could use it to send with my proposal. The Testsuites for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), referenced in the above link, really gave me an overall structure of the way certain tools like "EXPECT" could be used to create framework and "Plugin Technology" be used to develop test programs....The whole open source world is really interesting....

Anyway, I have taken the whole day from early morning for proposal and am happy that I have been able to atleast participate in an open online scholarship event like this.

Since not much research could be done on the day of submission, I don't have much confidence about getting shortlisted to do the project. If I am, I have gotta a hell lot to learn about great stuffs like High Performance Computing, Grid computing etc...Though this idea might sound great for any open source developer, I am really starting to get nervous!!:-(

Let me concentrate on my exams now...next is Digital Signal Processing(DSP)...
Hoping to have a nice weekend.....

Bye!!

P.S. My blog readers (stat counter) have gone above 1000, glad to know that!!