LUG meet

This is an account / writeup of the LUG meet conducted this saturday, announced here:
http://groups.google.com/group/jiitlug/browse_thread/thread/d4cdb5205f986cb4/b3ddd1a0de030ac1#b3ddd1a0de030ac1

For those who missed out on attending this meetup, have definitely missed out on a lot. In summary, we had a (short) installfest, an enlightening hands-on workshop on QT GUI development, and something we've hardly done before - discussions.. a lot of short discussions focused on several different topics, bouncing from one to the other as the participants pleased, both ad-hoc and group. It was a true "linux user group meet" this time, which was majorly influenced by the external audience. They've got it going since a long time and know how it's done. It's time we learnt it from them. Ajay had sprung up some discussions on the utility and power of the world wide web - on the importance of going out there and making your presence, something which JIITians seriously need to execute to stay ahead in the race. Ankur and I talked on AJAX for some time. We discussed a few problems Tejas (a 2nd yearite) had been facing in his project. Thanks to the meet we were able to understand what his problem really was which was described quite differently on the list and we were able to tell him concrete solutions then. All's well that ends well anyway.

We did some initial warming up and discussing, until Shantanu was all set for starting the QT workshop. I sincerely want to thank Shantanu for holding an excellent workshop indeed. We did not provision a projector, so everyone gathered around and sat in a cirlce listening to Shantanu's insight into GUI development in QT. He started with few hello world examples, demonstrating both command-line and QT-Designer based development styles leaving it to the audience to choose their own as they like. A fellow (pardon me I don't remember your name) showed off an OpenGL demo application made in QT on his MacBook Pro running OSX - which was simply amazing! I hope that the students who attended this workshop make full use of the knowledge gained in their academic projects or just go out and contribute. Let us all know what you make :)

It was nice to see many people from outside college turn up this time :)

We had Sandeep Mali and Shantanu Choudhary from Sarai, Kinshuk from OSSCube (the company which started OSSCamps ;)), Ajay (who has also come to our college earlier too - in the Sudhir Gandhotra meet), Prateek from Mentor Graphics, Khushbu Mohta from Krishna Engineering College and (a couple more guys I'm missing).

We started at the scheduled time but people did not turn up till 12. And we had to go through the usual drill of calling up people, telling them about the meet, only to first find out they have no clue there was one scheduled (despite the mailing list posts, cross posts and posters all around the campus). Anyway I did a head count in the middle of the QT workshop and there were 17 people till then.

Khushbu brought along her XO. The XO is the 100$ laptop developed under the popular One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Prakhar and Khushbu had developed a cool application for the XO platform called the TypingTurtle. It shows a word on the screen, and a turtle moves across the word as you type each letter. It's a cool game for kids to help them learn how to type. The XO definitely got people excited and added on to the 'air of openness' :)

Near the end of the meet Prakhar distributed free fedora 9 dvd's to all folks present (from his fed-ambassador bag of goodies) and we posed for a group photograph holding them up :)


Check out the rest of the pics on our new picasa albums:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jiitlug/November7th2008InstallFestWorkshop

Well the overall outcome is that it really felt like having a LUG meet - a place where geeks meetup, connect, network and share ideas and thoughts - and we just did that yet again. Thanks to Ankur for running around to get people to attend. Thanks Prakhar for calling so many friends from outside. It really gave a lot of meaning to the meet. Thanks to the CL4 admin for letting us take responsibility of the lab for the day. And thanks everyone for joining. The tux is back in college folks :)