Thursday, August 30, 2007

Virtual Reality, OpenGL and SDL based 3D programming - Sat, 8th Sep at 5pm


An eminent speaker, Mr. A. P. Rajshekhar, will be delivering this interesting and informative talk on Virtual Reality, OpenGL and SDL based 3D programming.

Virtual Reality is a technology which allows a user to interact in a computer simulated environment, be it real or imagined one.

To realize the rich graphics environment for the user, it is necessary to have toolkits and libraries.

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia, OpenSource library written in C that creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or multimedia application.

Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics.

Mr. A.P.Rajshekhar is currently a Project Engineer (Tech Lead for Web development team) with C-DAC, Hyderabad.

Mr. Rajshekhar holds Bachelors Degree in Computer Science(Honors) and Post Graduate Diploma in Advanced Computing(PGDC) from C-DAC.

While pursuing Bachelors Degree, he worked as a Developer with Arushi, a NGO in Bhopal for 2 years. Here he was involved in development of PC based Synthesizer using Windows API. Presently, he is working in multi-lingual interface enabled Learning Management System based on J2EE. His other endeavors at C-DAC include low-cost SCM solution for SME and development of Quality Assurance Framework for e-learning Systems.

He is a regular contributor to DevShed portals on topics ranging from Game programming to web based application development. His areas of interest are 3D programming and Virtual Reality systems.

Mr. A. P. Rajshekhar will talk in detail about the following:
. Virtual Reality
. 3D Programming concepts
. Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
. Open Graphics Library (OpenGL)
. Programming Illustrations & Scenarios

Date: Sat, 8th September, 2007.

Time: 5pm - 7:30pm.

Venue
5th Floor Conf Room,
CommVault Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd.
Ashoka Janardhan Chambers
S.P. Road,
Begumpet
Hyderabad 500 016.

To help locate the venue, a photo of the building is available here.
http://www.twincling.org/images/sponsor/commvault.jpg

All the members are cordially invited to attend this hands-on
informative session and benefit from it.

This is a FREE event.

You are requested to kindly reach the venue 10 min in advance to
handle the security check. All the attendees are requested to kindly
cooperate in this matter since the security has to handle large number
of visitors.

For assistance, please call the Society helpline :
+91 - 98482 37656
+91 - 99492 53753

Please feel free to forward this link to your colleagues and friends.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Backup & Recovery TSM update



Ms. Namita Iyer, delivered an awesome talk on 'Backup & Recovery' - an Open Source perspective to a highly participative and thrilled audience.

Namita Iyer discussed about the basic need of a backup. She talked about full backups, differential and incremental backups, backup of backup - auxillary copies - inline aux copies, online backup (backup as users are accessing) - quiescing and snapshots, backup of different applications - mail, database, backup complete disks - block level backup, backup to different media - tape, optical, reusing backup media - pruning unwanted backups, restores: search backed up data - indexes - and selectively restore, different backup configurations - backup to NAS, SAN, Lan-free, Server-free (proxy).

Namita also discussed about Recovery points, RPOs and RTOs - Replication and continuous replication (app aware) with recovery points, add-on features of backup - compression, encryption

A very important highlight of the discussion was, Archival - how is it different from backup ?.ILM solutions for file and mail.

Next up in discussion was features offered and issues with Commercial backup vendors - CV, Veritas, CA brightstor, EMC Networker (legato).

Namita Iyer talked at length about OpenSource backup product Amanda - Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver.

Manoj, Chaitanya, Vimal and Mahen came up with real life observations in the context of recovery. Vimal delivered an impromptu explanation of the MD5 vulnerability and how it came to light.

Thanks to everybody who made the TSM such a memorable event.

Folks, please visit the Backup & Recovery TSM photogallery at
http://www.twincling.org/node/103

ShriPhani is youngest member at 16yrs of age



The recent community meet held on Sat, 11th August was unique as we had the youngest member, Sri Phani join TWINCLING Society at 16 years of age. Sri Phani is a very enthusiastic Class XII student of H.P.S. who is currently exploring Python and wants to consult on Linux System Administration opportunities.

Shriphani Palakodety at 16yrs of age is the youngest member of TWINCLING Society.

At an age when most people have fun and play with cool gizmos, Sriphani has created a niche for himself by focussing exclusively on Linux and Python. He wants to do something really creative.

In his own words,
I am a guy who is still studying in class 12. I want to embark on a project that sets up a network as soon as boxes are plugged together. I wish to embark on this as the school where I studied till class 10 (HPS R)
which is pretty reputed, had disgusting computer programs and used propreitary software(illegally of course).

A free utility that will do the same would be an ideal gift to my school. I would like to do this in python. I need advice on how to embark on something like this and what i need to learn. I do not care about speed with which objective is achieved and so on. I want to enjoy the journey and reach this goal.


A few community members have come forward to mentor Sriphani. All the best for your future endeavours.