Journey through the Rain

Dear All..
Sorry for not posting here much...

Anyways, here's something for you..
These were the photos taken while coming to Kolkatta from Chennai..
We got stuck at a place called Contai Road. The train would move no further from this station since the rails were under water. We had to then, find another mode of transport. The roads were also inaccessible for sometime.
I was able to see some of the views of the Orissa and WB floods first hand...

The journey was an adventurous one and I made quite a few friends...

Have a look at the photos...

Electric Tower


Electric Tower


Fields


Road Blocked!





High Water



Trees under water





Raining Hard


Bare Path!





Windy and Rainy


Flowing Away!


Come Here!!


With a friend,Atul I met at Train


Trees under water again


Well..Well..


Yeah..Those are trees


Yes..Them too..








A building and trees






Road(National Highway) to Kolkatta from Conatai Road

The pictures above were taken by Atul and me. The ones without dates are in Atul's credit and the ones with dates are mine.

..so finally how did we reach Kolkatta?

We, i.e Atul(the stud we met in train), Sumit (my colleageues and friend) and I, got off the train and went to the streets to find some bus or anything..For sometime, there were no transport going to that part..Then, a bus went off and once the acknowledgement from the first bus was recieved, the rest of the buses were also going.Railway authorities were announcing that there were private buses going from the place.. But we could'nt get onto any of them since there were people sitting even on the roof of the bus and hanging onto the doors also!!Then, there were 2 elderly(not too elderly) couples with us,one couple wanted to reach Kolkatta and the other, Howrah (railway station close to Kolkatta). So, we decided we'll all go together..So , now it became a family of 8 people: i.e. atul,sumit,priya(colleague and friend), I and the 2 Couples. There was hell of a lot of luggage for all of us. We got an Armada Cruiser and after a bit of bargaining, the driver told us he'l take us till Kharagpur(its in between contai road and Kolkatta). Ok..so we thought "Something is better than Nothing" and the whole 'family' got in. Once at Kharagpur, we again had to hunt for transport. But one of the uncles with us had a contact in Khargapur and he arranged a Bolero. That was enough for us to reach Kolkatta...

It was a journey made up of a lot of emotions.

CFF Results Out!!

Amrita University has just been declared the Winner of Sun's Code for freedom contest.
2 guys from our college are getting a Laptop form Sun. Well, guess who.. You should have guessed right if you would've read my previous post.

Ok..Its none other than Rishi and Avinash - the most avid student bug fixers on OpenSolaris of the country...
The last time I saw Rishi, he was hiding under a table so that we don't give him the regular bumps we give when he gets something good. But anyways, we managed to find him and give a nice one...

15 of us are getting ready to attend the Sun Tech Days to be held in Hyderabad this 27th, 28th and 29th..

Looking forward to it....

My First Post and CFF

Well, this is first post on my blog...
The feeling that I need to create a blog was in my mind for quite a sometime now. But there's a very good reason why did'nt I do it. I've been busy with Code For Freedom - a contest conducted by Sun Microsystems as part of it's University Program. It really has been a period of learning and recreation for me the past 3 months or so. My college Faculty, Vipin Sir was the one who introduced me into this contest. He said that there were 5 technologies that you could work on and it will be a good learning experience. There were already some people like Avinash and Rishi working on OpenSolaris - Operating System from Sun. He also told me that Apache Derby will be a good option and that it is written completely in java. He's got me there...!!
Java always had been my favourite programming language. And the prospect that apache derby is a Relational Database drove me for that. I had learnt Oracle and used MySQL and have wondered how does the query optimizer,etc. actually worked. I wanted to see the source code but never really tried for it....
Now, HERE IS THE CHANCE!!!
There was one more reason why i took up Derby : I'll be doing something different from everyone else ....

I got the derby source and build it..it all worked FINE...BOY! Where was my confience level?
Then, I got a mentor from Sun, a guy called Mayuresh Nirhali (his blog here). It started off with a simple mail from him saying that he will be my mentor for Derby for Code For Freedom(CFF).
Then, I tell him the problems I faced in Derby and then, sooner or later, I get the answer. The good thing about him is that he wanted me to do the core work and he'll just tell me the general things of derby, debugging, testing.etc. My friends and me have learnt a lot because of this. I assigned myself a simple bug(it looked simple!) at the jira website. I started working on it and it was this time that I learnt how OPEN the OpenSource community is. Suddenly, I liked everything about Opensource. There is this lot of people who don't even know you helping you out when you are stuck somewhere in the fixing procedure. I post a query to derby-dev@db.apache.org and within 24 hours, a bunch of replies are there in my inbox. "THIS is AWESOME"...

After a week or so, a couple of college mates - Sandeep and Abishek also joined the race. I took up another bug to work on and on 30th of Jan, 2008 I made my first contribution to the Opensource world. I attached the diff file for DERBY-2239. It got committed the same day. "That was FAST!!".
Mayuresh's entry on his blog about this really boosted me...
Thanks a lot, Mayuresh....

A lot of students also came into the scene...Solaris bug fix-ers also started fixing up bugs in derby and everyone was suddenly busy.
I also laid my hands on some OpenSolaris bugs too with the help of my good friend and Star Bug Fix-er of Amrita, Rishi.

The whole contest was fun. It was fun listening to Rishi's and Avinash's strategies. It was fun, when a build or test comes right after about 2 days of trying. It was fun instructing the others. It was fun finding bugs and reporting them. It was fun watching guys working "even on Valentines Day". SUN made it all FUN.

On Feb 14 at 12:00 am, the contest was closed.

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham(Amrita University) has contributed a total of 87 bug fixes on OpenSolaris, 16 bug fixes on Apache Derby and also some on OpenPortal.

Team Amrita:

Avinash T Joshi

Rishi M Nair

Archana R

Meera R

Chitra B

Abhilash T G

Deepthi Devaki

R Vidyalakshmi

Sandeep

Abishek

Jazarine Jamal

Arjun Vasudev

Indu Vijayan

Sajith K

Venugopal M

Krishnakumar

Rejeeshnath

Vishak M R

Lekshmy G. Pillai

Balagopal R

Sindhu Vidyasagar

Parvathy S

Jayahari K R

Rohan S

Vishnudatha Kanjur

Man, am I proud to be part of the winning team!