Twincling Technology Foundation, Hyderabad AP, India

Read the Twincling blog

2009-02-23T11:32:00.002+05:30

Folks, all the Twincling blogs and latest updates are at
http://www.twincling.org/blog

RSS feeds are available at
www.twincling.org/rss.xml

Follow us on Twitter at
twitter.com/twincling

Twincling Vijayawada

2008-11-22T20:53:00.000+05:30

To better serve the interests of Open Source enthusiasts in Andhra region and create a focussed engineering team along the lines of the professional Twincling team at Hyderabad, we've started Twincling Vijayawada.

The core team is lead by Sandip Tiwari (sandip AT twincling DOT org) and is expected to be supported by Bishal and Saroj. The first set of activities in terms of infrastructure and projects has been identified.

If you are located in Vijayawada, Guntur and are passionate about Open Source vision and projects, please drop in a line with your contact details to Sandip Tiwari. We'd need many volunteers to work on the various initiatives and will appreciate all the help we can get.

Please take a look at http://vijayawada.twincling.org/

Open Source Days 2008 (Aug 2 - Aug 10)

2008-07-23T12:34:00.002+05:30

Open Source Days 2008 is a 9-day event scheduled to be held from Saturday, August 02, 2008 to Sunday, August 10, 2008.

The theme is - 'Get Smart, Do Well and Have Fun' !

The Objective of Open Source Days 2008 is to educate and empower participants with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed in todays fast changing IT world.

You need solid technical skills to do well in your academic career, in your job to deliver results. Open Source software helps you acquire those skills and build your credentials.

Open Source Days 2008 is a fun-filled yet technically focussed event which has a mix of technical presentations, interactive discussions with professionals and workshops. There will be many hands-on Workshops at multiple locations.

There is also going to be a Quiz on 9th of August from 4:30pm - 5:30pm.

Writing code, executing test cases, reviewing bugs, participating in Open Source community projects helps develop software programming and communication skills. As part of the Twincling mentorship programme, you get to learn about the various Open Source project opportunities and how you can participate. You'll also have a chance to discuss and know about mentors.

Thanks to sponsors, You can win yourself Software CDs, T-shirts and other exciting prizes like Headphones, DVD Player !

Workshop Focus Areas (Technical areas)

. Linux/UNIX Administration

. Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Setup and Administration

. OpenSuSe 11 Linux Setup and Administration

. FreeBSD 7 administration

. OpenSolaris 10 administration

. Package management (portage, ports, pkg, rpm)

. Ruby scripting

. Portable shell scripting

. Regular Expressions

. Linux systems programming

. Linux network programming

. Building Linux Clusters

. OpenSolaris Systems Programming

. Linux File system (ext2) concepts and programming

. File system development

. Linux TCP/IP stack internals

. BSD TCP/IP stack internals

. Network Security (SSL, IPSEC)

. OpenSSL and PKI infrastructure essentials

. Developing Anti-Virus software

. Anti-spam software development and Bloom Filters

. PostGreSQL database setup and administration

. PostGreSQL C++ / Ruby / PHP database programming

. LAMP setup, configuration and PHP 5 programming

. WebServices and SOAP programming with PHP

. Drupal module programming (for Drupal 6.2)

. ISO C99 Programming and library development

. OpenSSL API Programming using C

. Firefox architecture and developing Firefox plugins

. Firefox XPCOM C++ programming

. C++ Programming (class based design, functors)

. C++ and STL (Standard Template Library) Programming

. C++ GUI Programming with QT 4.3

. KDE 4.x plugins programming

. Open Source Games design and programming (using KDE/Qt/C++)

. OpenGL Programming (using KDE/Qt/C++)

. Semantic Web Essentials, RDF, Ontology, DAML

. XML essentials and programming (DTD, XMLSchemas, XSLT)

. XML Security vocabularies (XMLDSig, XMLEnc, XMLKMS)

. Core Java Programming

. Enterprise Java Programming (Servlets)

. Middle-tier Java Programming (EJB)

. Software Design Patterns

. Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

. Middleware technologies - CORBA - C++ programming

. AI Agent programming using Prolog

. Developing Distributed Applications with Erlang and OTP

. Real-time Streaming Multimedia using Helix Community server

Workshop Focus Areas (Community)

. Getting started in Open Source Projects

. How to contribute to OpenSuSe Linux project

. How to contribute to Gentoo Linux Project

. KDE 4.x project and opportunities

. Twincling projects

. Open Source Games projects

All Workshop sessions have been modularized for 1-day, 2-day or 3-day sessions with focus on programming and follow up projects. To the maximum extent possible, the Society will be providing course material for the various workshop sessions online and in PDF format.

How to register your college ?
Write a mail to info@twincling.org with your college name, contact number and the topic (please select upto two topics) you are interested in having a workshop on. The Organizing team will get in touch and finalize the event.

Please note that the best three participants from each college will get T-shirts and also an offer of mentorship in the Twincling Open Source projects.

So, Get Smart, Do Well and Have Fun' !

Organizing Team

Namita Iyer
Twincling Society.

Leela Manoranjan
Cordys.

Maruthi Vutla
AppLabs.

Rajesh Sarangapani
Accenture.

Sumit Upadhyay
Bank of America.

Sampath Inturi
Open Source Geek.

Ananth Pattabiraman
Open Source Geek, Music composer.

Umamaheshwararao Lankoti
Azingo.

Saurabh Bhatia
Safew Labs.

Ragu Pattabiraman
Intergraph.

Saifi Khan
Twincling.

About Us
Twincling Society is India's "first" independent, professionally managed, not for profit, registered Open Source promotion and development organization. Incorporated in Hyderabad AP, India, the charter of the Society is - to promote and develop Open Source software.

Twincling Technology Foundation is an initiative of Twincling Society with a single track focus on technical excellence and innovation. All the software developed by Twincling Society is released under Apache Software License 2.0 (ASL).

Website
http://www.twincling.org/

Helpline
+91-98484 59669
+91-98492 53753

Contact Us
info@twincling.org

Sponsors
Twincling Society would like to thank Avansec for sponsorship of the event. Avansec is a startup, focussed on developing green solutions for datacenters.

Would you like to be sponsor for the event ?
We'd love to hear from you. Please write to info@twincling.org

OSEF 2008 - bringing entrepreneurs together

2008-06-02T19:44:00.002+05:30

It was an exhilirating experience working towards OSEF 2008 and Community 2008, and accomplishing the goals of promoting the Open Source vision.

Maruthi, Namita, Alolita, Nilayan, Uma and Saurabh had done an amazing amount of groundwork thinking through, involving the right set of people and executing it.

Poorna Shashank, Sumanth Krishna, O V L Kiran Kumar, Ramesh Rajamani and E. Sivakrishna of Synovel, were supportive of the event and volunteered for assistance. A big thanks to all. You guys rock !

The event started with Ms. Namita Iyer, President of the Society, talking about Open Source and how it helps boot strap product companies that can go on to build market leading products and nurture a community as well.

Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director of Open Source Initiative (OSI) and CEO, Technetra, started the session by asking the attendees a simple question - "what are three words that come to our mind, when we think of Open Source". The question really set a buzz among the members and make the people really interactive.

For the first time it has been possible in the IT industry that corporates can access "fairly" and "openly" world class software developed by world class developers.

Sharing between competitors provides them a level playing ground to compete in developing innovative applications over Open Source platform.

According to Alolita, "The competition is in innovation and providing services. It is a key enabler of change for prosperity".

The talk by Mr. D D Ganguly, founder and CEO of DimDim was awesome and as candid as ever.

He shared his startup experience and how he acquired seed capital and further funding from VCs. He talked about how to play the mating game with VCs in order for them to find your venture attractive enough to fund. VCs fund in millions, hence will never do seed funding. For seed funding, entrepreneurs should find someone who loves them and will fund them for being them. Last but not the least, he emphasized that the primary motive of entrepreneurs should be to create wealth for themselves and for their stake holders. The audience thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity for a heart-to-heart talk with a successful open source entrepreneur - who actually got big VCs to fund his venture.

Mr. D D Ganguly from DimDim, Mr. Suren Poruri from Polaris, Mr. Pramod and Mr. Sivakumar from AppLabs, folks from CA, Mr. Sivakrishna from Synovel, budding entrepreneurs from Genpact, NIC, Satyam and many startup companies actively participated in the session. Mr. Saurabh Bhatia, of SafewLabs shared his journey as an entrepreneur with the audience.

Mr. Sivakrishna, CEO of Synovel, presented an overview of Spicebird at the event. In his words, Collaboration is much beyond e-mail communication – it's a process where individuals work together to achieve a common goal. Apart from having e-mail, instant messaging and group calendaring, an ideal collaboration system should make 'working together' possible – like creating a proposal, launching a new product, developing software, managing group knowledge and publishing websites even while working from different continents. Spicebird - the collaboration suite developed by us, creates a platform to do precisely that. In addition, Spicebird makes customization easy and ensures that the software can be adapted to your business collaboration needs.

Ms. Kavita Vemuri of Innovation Lab, and Dr. Vikram Pudi of Open Source research at IIIT Hyderabad, were very supportive of the event from the word go. Kavita also teaches Product Management at IIIT to the students and is also involved with academia to industry transfer initiatives.

In the future, we look forward to interacting very closely with students and faculty at IIIT, Hyderabad on Open Source activities and also conduct course on Open Source software licensing and legal issues. At Twincling Society, we invested a lot of time in working through Open Source licensing, Copyright and Trademark issues. This is critical as we are focussed on infrastructure software products development and want to create the largest ecosystem in the world ! more on that later.

To keep the participants energised and vigorously participate in the discussions, lip smacking Samosas, Paneer Pakoda and delectable Kala Jam from Tiwari Sweets (one of Hyderabad's best sweet shops) was laid out for all the attendees to savor.

We wanted to make sure that the best people, the best speakers, the best food and the best arrangments are made for such a special and first of its kind event ! At all Twincling events, the focus is on the quality of interaction, discussion and genuine interest.

The best part is that Hyderabad has that kind of people with energy to engage in discussions.

If that sounds incredible, then you should remember that OSEF 2008 came to an end at 4:15pm and Community 2008 started at Applabs GEC at 5pm. The GEC is located atleast 10 km from IIIT and a lot of the attendees of OSEF turned up for this event as well.

Sreeram Kaviliga, AVP and Arun D. Rao, VP, my close friends at AppLabs, were the hosts for Community 2008 at 3XL Conference, AppLabs GEC. Arun, spoke on the occassion, sharing his vision about Open Source and how he sees close synergy between AppLabs goals and Twincling Society.

Sai Chintala, VP, and Rajesh Patil, Architect, made a presentation on Open Source initiatives at AppLabs, TEMA product and also shared their experiences.

Alolita who is a Director on the Board of Open Source Initiative, spoke on "How to build an Open Source Community".

The importance of nurturing an Open Source community with the right elements and Community leads cannot be over emphasised.

At Twincling, we have cultivated a "user" community with an excellent mix of professionals and students in the last 4 years. The experience that we have gained is immensely valuable and positions us uniquely.

Now, as we move to the GLOBAL orbit of developing world-class Open Source products (licensed under Apache License 2.0), we need to mentor and cultivate a "developer" community.

A "developer" community will create a better quality IT workforce in Hyderabad and provide Andhra Pradesh a competitive advantage.

How are we going to do that ? Well, i'll talk about that in the next blog.

Coming back after the event, we had a long day and all of us were physically tired and yet we had a 5-hour long Strategy meeting to chalk out the go-GLOBAL plan.

Special thanks to our dear friends Pratima and Ajay at Cybermedia who helped with the subscription form and May 2008 issues of the DARE magazine. It is an amazing magazine, 'DARE - Because entrepreneurs do'. Guys, we still have a few magazines available to give out to folks. So, if you are interested, please drop in a line to info@twincling.org and collect it at the next Saturday meet.

Thats not all :-) To further discussions on entrepreneurship, we have WiTi (What I Think Is) list. Consider joining it at, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/witi

See you all at, TWINCLING Open Source Summit 2008 on Saturday, December 13, 2008.

What makes TWINCLING Society unique ..

2008-04-07T02:31:00.002+05:30

TWINCLING Society is a "not-for-profit" society, incorporated in Hyderabad, India, under the Andhra Pradesh Societies Registration Act, 2001. (10th December, 2001, vide G.O.Ms.No. 742, Revenue (R&M), dt. 10.12.2001).

The charter of TWINCLING Society is to Promote and Develop Open Source software.

The Society conducts Technical Events on Open Source technologies on 2nd Saturday of every month. Technical Workshops are conducted to demonstrate live scenarios to organizations and community. As part of the student outreach programme, the Society volunteers have conducted numerous technical sessions at more than fifty colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Western Maharashtra.

Open Source RoundUp is an annual Open Source event conducted by TWINCLING Society that brings together the Open Source community, to discuss trends, core issues, opportunities and challenges in the Open Source arena. This event is conducted in Hyderabad in the second week of December every year.

Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum (OSEF) is an initiative of the Society to assist entrepreneurs in building their Open Source businesses and create a platform that brings together experienced professionals, angel investors together and facilitates exchange of ideas and networking opportunities.

The Society is led by a strong professional and technically experienced Team that takes pride in execution. The Society activities are managed by a seven member Board and governed by the Society bye-laws. Ms. Namita Iyer is the President, Mr. Satish Vellanki is the Vice President,Mr. Sumit Upadhyay is the General Secretary and Mr. Narender Rao is the Joint Secretary of the Society. The board executes ideas and strategies jointly evolved with the senior and experienced professionals of the Advisory Board and the Community Leads, who map them to community activities.

The Society operates a bank account at ICICI Bank, Nagarjuna Hills branch. The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Society is held in December every year. The AGM consolidates the suggestions from peer international societies, legal counsel and auditors, to define the strategy and plan of action, for the next year.

The Society has more than 2,600 members with a significant reach out initiative in Andhra Pradesh. The society has assisted organizations and educational institutions in migrating to Open Source technologies. Society volunteers have received numerous appreciation shields and letters from the beneficiaries.

To support a vibrant Open Source community, the society activities are organized around Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that focus on

IRC Channel
#twincling on freenode.net

Contact Us
To know more about our Open Source vision and participate in community activities, please write to info@twincling.org or call the society helpline at +91-98492 53753

Install Fest (Linux, BSD)

2008-03-23T09:52:00.000+05:30

An exciting 'Linux/BSD InstallFest' has been planned for Saturday, March 29 at 5pm. The venue is Floor 5, Conf Room, CommVault Systems.

A great way to get started with Linux/BSD is to actually try to install and configure it !

You are welcome to bring along your laptops to try out the stuff. There will be some laptops and 2-3 systems available to try the distros live and also in VM environments.

Some of the distros you get to play with are:
. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
. Sabayon Linux
. Gentoo
. Ubuntu
. Mandriva
. Fedora
. BOSS Linux
. Knoppix

Thanks to Saurabh Bhatia and Community Leads Uma and Sumanth, there will be multiple demos on installations, configuration and troubleshooting.

There will also be discussion on 'ODF' or Open Document Format (thanks to Nikhil).

All the geeks, entrepreneurs and techies are invited to join in and be part of the fun filled yet insightful evening that it is going to be on Saturday, March 29 at 5pm.

Venue details are available at http://www.twincling.org/node/181

All Open Source enthusiasts are cordially invited !

Sumanth to conduct Ruby,RoR workshop on Sat, 8th March

2008-03-04T13:23:00.000+05:30

Sumanth Krishna a Senior Developer at Google Engineering, Hyderabad will be conducting a Ruby, Ruby on Rails workshop on Saturday, 8th March from 5pm - 8pm.

This is the best time to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) given the industry momentum towards building feature rich web applications leveraged on productivity.

The focus of the workshop will be to help the participants to setup, configure the environment, design and develop the application and deploy the solution. So, if you got a laptop, you are welcome to bring in and plug in. Software will be available for download from a local repository accessible over 802.11a/b/g aka WiFi.

In Sumanth's own words, "Always looking out or creating oppurtunities to spread whatever little bit I know and to learn all that I don't know. My interests include browsing, blogging(TechSavvy) guiding, teaching, most important learning new things".

Sumanth started his career as PHP developer and part of many customization and implementations of php based products like moodle, mantis, wordpress, drupal, joomla, Expression Engine, sugar CRM. In his words, "Got kick with Web technologies, so my love with RoR still continuing".

Sumath holds a Master's degree from Sri Sathya Sai Institue of Higher Learning and in the past has worked as Software Engineer at Compassites a product based company in Bangalore.

Sumanth is a well known and active figure in TWINCLING Community and Events. You will see him leading community initiatives and playing a much bigger role in guiding the community towards excellence and growth.

Sumanth blogs at http://sumanthtechsavvy.blogspot.com/

If you are still thinking of Ruby or RoR, this is one of the best opportunities to jump start.

Snacks and Goodies will be available at the event. So mark your calendar today !

All Open Source geeks and enthusiasts are welcome !

Venue Information
http://www.twincling.org/node/181

Helpline
+91-98482 37656

Highlights, Photo gallery and future

2008-01-16T14:44:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends,

Thank you so much for making the Open Source RoundUp 2007 a wonderful and memorable success.

Key highlights:
. A large number of professionals who interacted with the would be professionals
. An insightful product idea presented by Mr. Ananth, a musician as he discussed the requirements of his profession.
. An excellent community discussion by Mr. Sumanth Krishna on Ruby on Rails and Mr. Abhishek Sinha on Java/Spring framework.
. A pragmatic and straight talk by Mr. Yaser Ansari on Project management in Open Source
. A heart to heart discussion on key issues by Mr. Maruthi Sivakumar Vutla which discussing 'CEO/CTO perspective on Open Source'
. The party was real fun with two cakes being cut and lots of tasty snacks from Gokul chat.
. 180 T-shirts being distributed among the delegates.
. The total event expenditure was about INR 21,380.

The Society would like to thank all the speakers - Mr. Mahesh, Mr. Manish, Mr. Rajesh, Mr. Naveen, Ms. Namita, Mr. Srinivas, Mr. Yaser, Mr. Maruthi, Mr. Srinivas Kavuri and Mr. Sumanth, for taking out their valuable time to interact with the community and share their experience.

The Society also thanks the esteemed delegates for such enthusiastic participation and interaction.

The photo gallery has been updated with the photos and the photos have been classified under various sections to provide a logical feel for the entire event. Please visit http://www.twincling.org/node/193

Open Source RoundUp 2008 is scheduled to be held on Saturday, December 13. It will be a full day event at an auditorium. The key focus areas for the year 2008 event are available at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/408410

With the support of the community, we hope to be able to make this year's event a greater success.

Thanks for your patience and understanding !

regards
News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Ps. we are sorry for the delay in updating the photographs.

Open Source RoundUp 2007 - Linux For You (LFY) Magazine

2007-12-10T17:41:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends,

The Society in association with Linux For You (LFY) magazine has brought out a special subscription offer for the members and Open Source enthusiasts.

Now, you can save upto 50% subscription on LFY magazine, when you subscribe using the form available during Open Source RoundUp 2007.

Subscription amount details are available at
http://www.twincling.org/node/183

Attendees can also pay by cheque. You need to add INR 50 for non-Delhi cheque.

You can also win yourself past issue of the LFY magazine. How ? That would be a pleasant surprise.

Linux For You (LFY) is a wonderful and informative magazine that focusses on Open Source software. Please visit the LFY website at http://www.lfymag.com/

So friends, please spread the word around about LFY magazine among your friends and colleagues.

thanks
News & Editorial Team.

Open Source RoundUp 2007 - Career Networking, Resume drop box

2007-12-09T08:37:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends,

The community does well, when its members are also doing well !

Todays student is tomorrow's engineer and todays engineer is tomorrow's decision maker.

If the engineers and the decision makers are developing Open Source software or developing products that use Open Source software, then there are opportunities for growth and contribution for the members of the community.

This thought is central to Career Networking forum and Resume drop box facility that has been organized for Open Source RoundUp 2007.

Many of the speakers and companies have elicited interest in Open Source technology skills.

Please see the focus areas:
. Ajax (jquery, dojo)
. Web 2.0
. PHP
. L.A.M.P.
. C / Device drivers
. C++ / STL
. PERL / system automation
. Ruby / Rails
. JEE / JBoss / EJB
. Servlets / Tomcat
. MySQL

In addition to domain/tech interest/expertise, good problem solving skills are required.

This weekend may be a good time to review your resume and highlight the relevant points. Please feel free to submit a copy of your resume with focus area mentioned on the top, to the Career Forum coordinator.

For any clarfications please call helpline on +91-98482 37656 or +91-98492 53753

Registration is FREE of charge, and so make sure that you register for the conference today at http://www.twincling.org

All the best.

regards
News & Editorial Team.

Open Source RoundUp 2007

2007-12-06T00:08:00.000+05:30

REGISTRATION OPEN

The Annual Open Source event for the Open Source community in Hyderabad.
Sat, 15 Dec @ 4:30pm at Floor 5 Hall

Open Source RoundUp 2007 is the event that brings together professionals and practitioners with focus on Open Source in projects, product development, project management, test platforms, embedded systems, kernel engineering, bio sciences and social networking.

Discussing trends, core issues in Open Source, what are the opportunities and the challenges, will be professionals from organizations like Satyam, Accenture, Tanla, Nokia, AppLabs, CDAC, Pramati, Ocimum Biosolutions and CommVault.

The technical event includes year end party, goodies for attendees and career networking forum with Resume drop box, to facilitate professionals and students seeking career opportunities in specific technologies.

REGISTRATION OPEN

Fedora 8 DVD (i386) available

2007-11-11T10:21:00.000+05:30

Fedora 8 DVD (3.4 GiB, i386) is now available for Society members and Open Source enthusiasts.

Notable feature highlights are:
Linux kernel 2.6.23
GCC 4.1.2
glibc-2.6.90-14
X.org 7.2 X server
Eclipse SDK version 3.3.0
KDE 4 Development Platform
Firefox 2.0
Thunderbird 2.0
Liberation Fonts
KDE 3.5.8
3D desktop support with Compiz
Gnome 2.20

Complete release notes are available at
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/

Fedora 8 is a 1-DVD set.
Working professionals are required to exchange with 2 blank DVDs.
Students are required to exchange with 1 blank DVD.

Please place a request for your DVD by writing to info@twincling.org or call up +91-98482 37656

Please collect the F8-DVD by exchanging with your blank DVDs on Sat, 17th November between 4:30pm - 8pm at the TSM venue.

regards
News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Ruby on Rails - Sat, 17th November at 5pm

2007-10-31T10:40:00.000+05:30

Ruby on Rails is an Open Source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

You will be glad to know that the next TSM is on "Ruby, Ruby on Rails".

The TSM is scheduled to be held on Sat, 17th November at 5pm on 5th Floor, Conf Room, CommVault Systems, S.P. Road, Begumpet.

Mr. A. P. Rajshekhar will be the speaker for this talk.

Mr. Rajshekhar will talk in detail about:
. Brief overview of Ruby language
. Ruby on Rails Framework architecture
. M.V.C. Design Pattern
. Scaffolding
. O-R (object-relational) mapping
. Packages - Active Record Action Pack, Active Support, Action Mailer and Action Web Service.
. JavaScript and Ajax interaction support
. Code Examples
. Live Demos

Date: Sat, 17th November, 2007.

Time: 5pm - 7:45pm.

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 post to your colleagues and friends.

regards
News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Firefox hackathon and party photos

2007-10-29T16:47:00.000+05:30

a big thank you to all the participants of the Firefox Hackathon.

The spirit of Open Source was seen with the various members sharing their knowledge with the rest of the community. Trying out code, show casing examples and lots of interactive discussion were the finest point of the day.

Special thanks to P. Janaki Ram for show casing the PracticeManagement system that he has developed.

Special thanks to Appaji Rao, whose team won $150 USD for the best Firefox plugin of the month award.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and furthering the cause of Open Source.

We also had a Geek party after the hackathon to treat ourselves to some tasty snacks and chocolate pastries. Soft drinks were also available to boost the Zing factor.

FREE T-shirts were given to all the attendees of the event.

Look forward the participation of more Hyderabadi's in the future Hackathon events.

Firefox 3 Hackathon - Slashdot Party - Sat,. 27th Oct, 5pm - 9pm

2007-10-16T17:18:00.000+05:30

Some Geeky News here for firefox lovers and Open Source enthusiasts !

Firefox 3 Hackathon on Saturday, 27th October at 5pm

The Hackathon event will involve hacking Firefox code and creating some useful modules and code.

We will try to learn
. about Gecko layout engine
. programming with component technologies like XPCOM, XPInstall.
. how to write firefox plugins
. how to write firefox extensions

So get in your laptops and plugin for the event.

Wireless access point will be provided with a DHCP server running on 192.168.1.x/24 subnet.

We will also be having a party after the Hackathon - 'Slashdot 10yr anniversary party'.

Slashdot party registration is required, if you want ThinkGeek t-Shirts from Slashdot.

Step1:
Create a new account on slashdot
http://slashdot.org/login.pl?op=newuserform

Step2:
You will be mailed your password on email address you used for registration.
Please confirm your account and login in Slashdot.org
(you can directly click on the link in the mail)

Step3: (optional)
if you are not logged in, please click this link
http://slashdot.org/login.pl

Step4:
Visit this link
http://slashdot.org/anniversary.pl

You will see a drop-down list (used to search for party).
Select "OTHER" (it is the last entry in the drop down)

Step5:
You will see a list of many parties on the page.
Just search for 'twincling'
Select/Click the (*) radio button before the party description.
Next go to the end of the page (scroll down)
Click the button [Attend Party]

The response page will come up and say 'Party Attendance saved'.

Step6: (optional)
To verify that you name has been entered, visit this URL
http://slashdot.org/anniversary.pl?view_id=761

Verify that your name is there among the list of attendees.
That's it. You're in !

Please note that we will be giving out TWINCLING T-Shirts anyway to the Hackathon participants !

Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

2007-10-11T08:40:00.000+05:30

The Board of Directors in their quest to bring the best of Open Source to the members have aligned the Society activities around the (Special Interest Group or SIG model.

The S.I.G. model is the corner stone of focussed activities in societies like the I.E.E.E. (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) and A.C.M. (Association of Computing Machinery).

The three SIGs identified are :
. OpenSource
. Storage
. OpenSource and Entrepreneurship

Each SIG will have a chair(person), mailing list and volunteer leads. In this quarter, the chair for each SIG will be nominated and volunteer leads will be identified. The mailing lists have been piloted and significant interest has been seen.

Please visit SIGs webpage for more details.
http://sigs.twincling.org/

Please join the SIGs that interest you.

regards
News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Slashdot Party in Hyderabad on 27th October

2007-10-10T11:11:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends

TWINCLING Society is hosting the "SLASHDOT PARTY" on Saturday, 27th October at 5pm.

Slashdot.org is a site visited by many geeks and has about 5.5 million users per month.
It encourages its readers to read the articles linked to in the summary. Most of the articles are of technical nature and the discussions are very popular among geeks.

We are also planning to have 'Firefox Hackathon' on the same day to add to your Geek mood !

Here are the important details:

Title : Slashdot Party and Firefox Hackathon

Date : Saturday, 27th October, 2007

Time : 5pm - 7pm (Hackathon), 7pm - 9pm (Party)

Venue : 5th Floor, Conf Room, CommVault Systems, Ashok Janardhan Chambers, Begumpet.

For venue photograph and other details, please visit
http://events.twincling.org/

Hope to see all the Geeks out there !

daily POSIX

2007-10-10T08:11:00.000+05:30

Here's something new for TWINCLING Community members and Linux/BSD/UNIX programming enthusiasts.

POSIX is Portable Operating System Interface (for UNIX) or "portable" API for Linux/BSD/UNIX.

More formally, POSIX is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system.

Almost all the languages on Linux/BSD/UNIX ie. C, C++, PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, Shell provide POSIX APIs or functions or commands for programming. This ensures that the semantics of the function is the same as only the language binding is different.

To help the community get up to speed on understanding on POSIX, Society volunteers are starting a 'daily POSIX' posting. This will include the POSIX concept, function, programming examples and lots of discussion.

daily POSIX starts on Monday, 15th October and we run it till we have gone through the entire POSIX.

Stay tuned.

thanks & regards
News and Editorial Team.
http://www.twincling.org/

TSM - 13th October - AJAX and Web 2.0 programming paradigm

2007-10-04T18:25:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends,

You will be glad to know that the next TSM is on
"AJAX and Web 2.0 programming paradigm"

The TSM is scheduled to be held on Sat, 13th October at 5pm at 5th Floor, Conf Room, CommVault Systems.(Please see complete details below).

Mr. Rajshekhar Sheela, will be the speaker for this talk.

About the speaker
The speaker, Mr. Rajshekhar Sheela is currently working as a Team Lead (R&D) at GetSet Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Hyderabad and is closely associated with building solutions in the Hospitality and Tourism domain.

He is interested in the architectural aspects of AJAX and Web 2.0 applications. On the middle-tier side, Mr. Rajshekhar Sheela, has focussed on Java/J2EE based solutions.

Mr. Rajshekhar will talk in detail about the following:
. AJAX Architecture
. Core technologies (XML, JavaScript, DOM, XMLHttp)
. AJAX programming solutions
. Designing AJAX based solutions

Date: Sat, 13th October, 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.

Mpower project launched

2007-10-01T12:00:00.000+05:30

Feature rich Open Source content management platforms like Drupal power thousands of websites. The community of users visiting and accessing the services of these websites is increasingly found to be mobile phone or PDA users.

We at TWINCLING Society, see a great opportunity to provide value innovation to mobile users and existing drupal powered websites, by providing an Open Source 'mobile enabler' solution.

Mpower is an Open Source project to mobile enable your website and provide natural mobile user experience.

To know about the product value proposition, pleaese download the presentation slides.

Please visit the Mpower engineering website at http://www.twincling.org/node/121

Reaching out to 350 colleges in Andhra Pradesh

2007-09-10T12:55:00.000+05:30

With single track pursuit of promoting and developing Open Source software, TWINCLING Society today reaches out to more than 350 colleges in Andhra Pradesh.

Member volunteers have furthered the vision of OpenSource by walking the talk and visited colleges all over Andhra Pradesh and also parts of Maharashtra. The response has been amazing and we have been humbled by the affection and support of the students at various colleges.

From sophisticated air-conditioned seminar halls at 22 degree celsius to thatched roof class room in sweltering 46 degree celsius we have done it all ! Our brochures, cards, flyers, Open Source media CD dispatch continue to support the face 2 face interaction that we have with students and individuals.

Please visit the Photo Gallery to see the background work that goes in to make sure that your college receives continues updates from TWINCLING Society, Hyderabad AP.

Link to Photo gallery

A big thank you to all the students, professionals, faculties, support staff and individuals from various walks of live who have helped us take the vision ahead !

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

2007-08-30T19:56:00.000+05:30

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.

Backup & Recovery TSM update

2007-08-14T16:06:00.000+05:30

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

2007-08-14T16:04:00.000+05:30

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.

TSM - Backup and Recovery - 11th August - 5pm

2007-07-31T21:03:00.000+05:30

Friends, you will be delighted to read that the next TSM (TWINCLING Saturday Meet) is on

'Backup and Recovery' - an Open Source perspective.

Abstract
Backup refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. These additional copies are typically called "backups."

Backups are useful primarily for two purposes:
1. to restore a computer to an operational state following a disaster (called disaster recovery)
2. to restore small numbers of files after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted.

The talk scheduled to be held on Saturday, 11th August at 5pm will be delivered by Ms. Namita Iyer.

Ms. Namita Iyer is a storage industry veteran with 9+ years experience, who has been involved in storage product development at Brocade, Veritas and CommVault among other companies.

She will be talking about various backup & recovery technologies and industry trends.
She will also highlight gaps and opportunities in this space and the value Open Source brings to the customer and enterprise.

Contents of the talk
. Overview of Backup, Recovery, Archiving concepts
. Opensource tools and utilities
. dump, restore, cpio, tar, dd
. Role of filesystem in backup, recovery
. PostgreSQL backup & recovery
. Bare metal restore
. Backup hardware techniques
. Live demo of scenarios

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 news update to your colleagues and friends.

regards
TWINCLING Society News & Editorial Team (TSNET)
http://www.twincling.org/

Hyderabad OpenSource Community

2007-07-16T09:24:00.000+05:30

A group photograph of the vibrant Open Source community at Hyderabad AP India.

XML Technologies Seminar - 14th July - 5pm

2007-06-29T19:44:00.000+05:30

Hey, we are delighted that you visited this page. You can keep abreast of the latest and the greatest events happening at TWINCLING Society. If you are keen speak aloud, let everybody know your ideas and you can be "the speaker", "the organizer" or just the "coolest person" around. So, go ahead and speak out !

Scheduled Events

From June 2007 will have two topics being discussed in every meet.

TSM - 70
Date: 14th July, 2007
Time: 5pm - 7:45pm
Topic: XML Technologies
Structuring information - XML
Extensions - Namespaces, XInclude, and XML Base
Language Syntax - DTD, XML Schema
Linking and Addressing - XLink, XPointer, and XPath
Document transformation - XSL and XSLT
Document querying - XQuery
Programming model - DOM, SAX, and JDOM

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

For details about the venue, please click here.

Helpline
info@twincling.org

+91-98482 37656
+91-98492 53753 (for Linux distro CD's)

Storage Technologies discussion list

2007-04-25T12:45:00.000+05:30

There is a lot of innovation happening in the storage technologies and Open Source projects are an important contributor in this space.

From a end user perspective, we are already witness to a personal terabyte, SCSI, SATA disks, RAID and increasingly sophisticated backups.

Recognizing the requirement to disseminate and share information, TWINCLING Society has started a Storage Technologies discussion list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/storage/

We plan to discuss the following topics -

Open Source storage Projects, Products and Libraries.

BSD and Linux kernel specific implementations

Open Source storage device driver implementations

Open Source storage appliance development

Storage Processors and Open Source device drivers
Storage Technology Discussion and Tutorials

Storage Trends, News and Blogs

Fast Ethernet, 1G, 10G, 100G Ethernet

Myrinet, Data Center Ethernet

Fiber Channel, FCIP, iFCP

SCSI, CAM, iSCSI, HBA Cards

SAN (Storage Area Networks)

NAS (Network Attached Storage)

Storage Security, LUN masking

Storage Virtualization approaches, Xen

Continuous Data Protection & Backup

Email & File Archiving

Compliance & Regulatory Issues

Business Continuity

Disaster Recovery Planning

Product Reviews

IETF Working Groups, Drafts, RFC

SNIA, t10, t11 draft/std tracker

Storage Patents

Storage specific Job postings

Hyderabad specific Storage Seminars, Workshops.

So if you are interested in storage technologies, please join the list today at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/storage/

Sat, 7th April - XEN - Open Source virtualization software

2007-03-19T17:03:00.000+05:30

TSM - 67
Topic: XEN - Open Source virtualization software
Date: 7th April
Time: 5pm - 9pm

The speaker for the session is Mr. Saifi Khan. He will talk on Virtualization technology, Xen architecture and how Xen is implemented on x86 platform.
Xen live demos will be done jointly by Narender Rao and Saifi Khan.

Contents
What is virtualization ?
Virtualization on x86 platform.
Applications of virtualization
XEN - Open source virtualization software
Architecture
Performance
How XEN is implemented
Live demo of XEN and its applications

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.

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 send this link to your friends and colleagues.

regards
TWINCLING Society News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Sat, 17th March - Advanced FreeBSD/Linux Networking

2007-03-12T11:38:00.000+05:30

The Advanced FreeBSD/Linux Networking session is scheduled to be held on Saturday, 17th March 2007 at 5pm.

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

There will be a demo lab setup for this session.

The broad level contents of the talk will cover -

NFS (Network File System)
CIFS/Samba
PPP/PPPoE
- Architecture
- Configuration and deployment
- Tips-n-tricks

New additions to the stack
- SCTP

RDMA Fabric technologies
- InfiniBand
- iWARP
- 1g, 10g and 100g ethernet
- DataCenter Ethernet
--

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 send this link to your friends and colleagues.

regards
TWINCLING Society News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

10th March - Networking Basics

2007-03-07T11:43:00.000+05:30

We are delighted to bring to the members of the Society, TSM on

N e t w o r k i n g B a s i c s (Part 1)

on Saturday, 10th March 2007 at 5pm.

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

The talk will be delivered by Mr. C. Naveen from Nokia Enterprise (India) Pvt.
Ltd. Mr. Naveen is a networking specialist and works with a variety of networking
devices and technologies.

Here is what Mr. Naveen will cover during the course of his 3hr talk.
There will also be a small demo lab setup for this session.

Basics of Networking

Introduction to TCP/IP protocol
how it is started
what protocols it covers
TCP/IP (layers)

Internet Protocol
how L4 protocols (tcp, udp) uses IP to send data to the destination
packet details

IP Routing & ICMP

UDP
mechanism working of udp
how udp is used by applications

Overview of Routers, Switches and Hubs
IP Addressing
Subnetting, Static Subnetting
and VLSM(variable length subnet mask
ifconfig command

Tools and Utilities
ping
traceroute
netstat
tcpdump

Services & Configuration
TFTP
DHCP
TELNET
FTP

Internet super server
inetd
xinetd
design, setup and configuration
--

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 forward this link to your friends and colleagues.

regards
TWINCLING Society News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

Sat 10th Feb - Ruby Programming language

2007-02-10T09:14:00.000+05:30

We are delighted to bring for you a fun and learning session on

R U B Y Programming language

on Saturday, 10th Feb, 5pm

at 5th Floor Conf Room,
CommVault Systems
Ashoka Janardhan Chambers
S.P. Road, Begumpet

Ruby is an interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable.

Ruby is well supported with feature rich libraries and also platform specific bindings.

As a highlight of Ruby's Object Oriented feature -

Ruby is a complete, full, pure object oriented language: OOL. This means all data in Ruby is an object.

Ruby's OO is carefully designed to be both complete and open for improvements. eg. Ruby has the ability to add methods to a class, or even to an instance during runtime.

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.

http://www.twincling.org/
freedom of innovation

Linux CLI Talk

2007-01-21T10:59:00.000+05:30

The first talk of the new year 2007 got off to a flying start.

Abrar Kazi was the speaker. He was in his full elements.

Abrar started by giving an overview of the shell interface and its various components.

He explained how the interpreter works, argument collection and then went on discuss many scripts in detail.

For those of us starting anew, an Open Source system like Linux or FreeBSD work through the various run levels with the help of multitudinous scripts (rc scripts)

A particularly useful place to look on your Linux system is /etc/init.d/ directory which contains a lot of scripts. Studying the scripts provides a good understanding of the various constructs (if, do, while, case, shift args) in terms of their usage.

One of the very important aspect of script development is intermediate state analysis and debugging.

'set -x -v'
'bash -xv'
are your friends while doing active script development.

Abrar illustrated a lot of interesting aspects related to
/etc/profile
su, su -, sudo, /etc/sudoers
variable scope in scripts
arith eval, $(( )), expr
sed
awk
sh
tr
awk -F
seq first last
seq last inc first

The discussion about Regular Expressions (reg ex) in the context of shell scripting and PCRE was very enlightening. The differences between grep, egrep, fgrep were very useful.

Knowledge of Regular expressions is very useful in the case of URL re-writing (mod_rewrite) as in path munging for creating clean URLs and redirected downloads on websites.

Editor architecture, key mapping and usage technique was another very interesting area of discussion.
ex
ed
sed
vi
vim
emacs
xemacs
were discussed.

Once a user understands the architecture and process model, using the editor can boost the productivity multiple times.

Many a member in the audience had a smile as they saw that the discussion addressed many of their outstanding queries.

Abrar is a very persuasive speaker whose Knowledge base span is very wide. You can see all Linux HOWTO filling up his laptop. There are all sorts of Open Source software on his laptop.

The two much deserved breaks in this intense and invigorating talk were fully utilized to catch up with friends and colleagues.

The free coffee from Cafe Coffee Day and Badam Milk added warmth to the bonhomie.

Mr. Kishore, who is a Ajax expert was seen yesterday after a long period of recovery from an unfortunate accident. We wish him good health in the coming year. Kishore is also mentoring a
TWINCLING Society member, Raghava, on a project.

As is customary in all TWINCLING Society Meets, many photos were taken and the group photo session was held at 9pm. The photos will be uploaded on the new website that will be
released shortly.

Thanks to all the patrons, members and well wishers of the Society who made it to the meet !

Thank you and have a great weekend.

sincerely
TWINCLING Society News and Editorial Team (TSNET)

Firefox 2.0 Hackathon

2006-12-12T13:26:00.000+05:30

First of its kind for the members and Open Source enthusiasts.

TWINCLING Society is organizing 'Firefox 2.0 Hackathon' session on Sat, 20th January, 2007.

The current plan is as follows -

Pre Session (1.5 hours)
1. Firefox technology quick fire tutorials (XUL, RDF, JavaScript)
2. Firefox architecture, Source code layout, How to build

In Session (4 hours)
1. Problem statement discussion (TWINCLING Toolbar)
2. Hacking

Post Session (30 min)
1. Review of the product development by the audience
2. Sharing experience while hacking.

We will setup a Wireless Wifi 802.11 a/b/g router (DHCP enabled) and a build server.

There will be enough power ports for you to plug-in your laptop and start hacking !

Refreshments and Coffee will be served during the course of the event!

The setup and conf room can accomodate upto 50 participants. See you then !

The venue is as always at 5th Floor, Conference Room, CommVault, Ashoka Janardhan Chambers, Opposite Shopper's Stop, S. P. Road, Begumpet, Hyderabad 500 033.

Mark your calendar for 4pm on 20th, January, 2007 !

LFY and CSI Magazines at Linux Top20

2006-12-08T21:11:00.000+05:30

For the benefits of the members of TWINCLING Society member, the Society will be displaying recent and current issues of Linux For You (LFY) magazine and Computer Society of India (CSI) Communications magazine.

Members are requested to take a look at the magazines and share with members any interesting article they appreciate.

The Society is also making available KNOPPIX, UBUNTU, XUBUNTU CD's at the venue.

Thank you once again for the tremendous response and look forward to see you at Linux Top20.

Linux Top20

2006-12-05T10:15:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends,

We are bringing out an exciting event for all the Open Source enthusiasts on Saturday, December 9, 2006 at 5pm. Here is presenting Linux Top20.

A panel of five experts to provide you the very best of information on Linux and Applications on Linux.

Here is mix of speakers domain expertise -
- A storage & device driver specialist
- A scripting & process automation expert
- A build, integration and packaging wizard
- A network engineer
- A Desktop, Multimedia apps magician

Take a look at the topics that are going to keep you engrossed for the 3 hours.

1. Multi boot configuration, grub, lilo

2. Storage disk - IDE, ATA, SCSI, SATA, PATA

3. USB Storage Devices - usb devices, mounting camera

4. Processes, top, ps, services, run levels and rc scripts, xinetd

5. Package management with rpm, versioning, keys,
package compilation, dependency resolution, rpm commands

6. Display and resolution, X11, xorg.conf

7. firewall setup, VPN Client setup

8. PPP, broadband connectivity, internet, proxies

9. Desktop Environment configuration (GNOME, KDE)

10. Multimedia, subsystems and products

11. Play mp3, mpeg, watch video CD and DVD, codecs

12. Watch TV on Linux

13. Access Windows partition and SAMBA share

14. CD/DVD writing,burn Video CD and DVD

15. Access mails, fetchmail, POP3, IMAP, RSS feeds

16. Office applications (Open Office, KOffice etc.)

17. Browser plugins, shockwave, jre, mplayer plugins

18. OpenGL, nVidia, ATI Radeon, AGP

19. Gaming, Doom with awad file

20. Accessing Linux from Windows, running linux on windows

There is more to come !

So spread the news around, tell it to your friends and colleagues !

Join in on Saturday, 9th December at 5pm at Ashok Janardhan Chambers, 5th Floor Conference Room, CommVault Systems.

Mark your calendar today !

A unique theme every month

2006-12-04T18:57:00.000+05:30

We are bringing out a new feature for all the members ie. a THEME

A "theme" is a subject matter of a conversation or discussion.

There will be unique theme every month that will reflect on -
* the mailing list
* the TSM talk
* the articles submitted for publication

This will help us focus on an domain and help create awareness and if explored well, even help develop reasonable expertise.

The theme for the month of December 2006 is - DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS !

You will be able to read, write and participate in discussions (on lists and saturday meets) specific to -
* GNOME
* KDE
* XFCE
* Desktop configuration
* Desktop hacks
* Desktop upgrades and migration
etc.

Please feel free to share this exciting news with your colleagues and friends.

regards
TWINCLING Society News & Editorial Team (TSNET)

TACOS

2006-11-30T12:43:00.000+05:30

TWINCLING Society launches the TACOS product development initiative.

The vision is to provide a web based intelligent configuration service which helps users to
- migrate easily from Windows to Linux/BSD system
- automatically setup core services on Linux/BSD system

The website has been setup and details are available at
https://wiki.twincling.org/index.php?title=TACOS

TSM - DSpace - 4th November - Saturday - 5pm - at CommVault Systems

2006-11-03T11:41:00.000+05:30

The next TWINCLING Saturday Meet (TSM) is scheduled to be held
on Saturday - 4th November
in the evening from 5pm - 8pm.
on 5th Floor, Conference Room,
CommVault Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd.

The topic is "DSPACE".

DSPACE is an open source software package which provides
the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly
used as the basis for an institutional repository.

It is also intended as a platform for Digital preservation
activities. Since its release in 2002, as a product of the
HP-MIT Alliance, it has been installed and is in production
at over 100 institutions around the globe, from large
universities to small higher education colleges and
research centres.

The speaker is Mr. Narender Rao, who is a Build & Integration
specialist. He also undertook Redhat certification (RHCE, 98%)
and has guided many aspiring students on RHCE.

He also invests time in Open Source and has closely explored
LFS (Linux from Scratch) on approaches to build a custom Linux distro.

On behalf of the Society, we are thankful that
Mr. Narender Rao has kindly given his consent to deliver
the Talk on this very important technology.

All the members and their friends / colleagues are invited to
benefit from talk on DSpace.

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

Look forward to seeing you there.

thanks
TSNET.

http://www.twincling.org/
freedom of innovation

Java Server Faces (JSF)-TSM-Sat, 7th October,-5pm -AppLabs

2006-09-19T13:47:00.000+05:30

Java Server Faces (JSF)

Sat, 7th October, 2006
Evening, 5pm - 8pm.

Venue:
3rd Floor, Conference Room
AppLabs Technologies
Road No. 2, Banjara Hills
Hyderabad - 34

Landmark:
AppLabs is located opposite KBR Park and near Jubilee Hills check post.

All are cordially invited for this FREE event.

TWINCLING Society
freedom of innovation
http://www.twincling.org/

AJAX Live-TSM-16th September-5pm-CommVault Systems

2006-09-14T10:29:00.000+05:30

AJAX Live

AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a term describing
a web development technique for creating interactive web applications
using a combination of:
HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets
for presenting information

Document Object Model, JavaScript to dynamically display
and interact with the information presented

XML, XSLT and the XMLHttpRequest object to interchange
and manipulate data asynchronously with the web server.

The speaker, Mr. Kishore is an experienced software professional
who has developed Web Applications extensively and has utilized
AJAX frameworks in his work.

This is a great opportunity to learn more about this very
important technique for developing optimized, responsive and
experience rich Web Applications.

Mr. Kishore is keen to share nuggets of experience and
showcase many demos for the benefit of the audience.

The Society is thankful to Mr. Kishore who has kindly agreed
to deliver this talk inspite of a very hectic schedule.

Members are requested to kindly arrive 10 min ahead in time
to handle parking, security check. Please endorse your entry
in the Visitor's register.

This is a FREE event.

Venue:
5th Floor, Conference Room
CommVault Systems India Private Ltd
Ashoka Janardhan Chambers
S.P. Road, Begumpet, Hyderabad.

Landmark:
CommVault is located above Nalli Silks on S.P. Road, Begumpet.
Ashok Janardhan chambers is opposite Shopper's Stop.

Society helpline : +91 - 99482 37656

TWINCLING Society
freedom of innovation
http://www.twincling.org/

Linux Install Fest -TSM -2nd September-5pm-AppLabs

2006-08-23T10:33:00.000+05:30

Linux Install Fest

Debian Linux
Fedora Core 5

Sat, 2nd September, 2006
Evening, 5pm - 8pm.

Venue:
3rd Floor, Conference Room
AppLabs Technologies
Road No. 2, Banjara Hills
Hyderabad - 34

Landmark:
AppLabs is located opposite KBR Park and near Jubilee Hills check post.

All are cordially invited for this 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.

Society helpline : +91 - 99496 50605

TWINCLING Society
freedom of innovation
http://www.twincling.org/

E T H I C A L - H A C K I N G - TSM - 19th August - 5pm-CommVault

2006-08-18T11:36:00.000+05:30

You are invited for TWINCLING Saturday Meet (TSM) on

E T H I C A L H A C K I N G

Date : Saturday, 19th August

Time : evening, 5pm - 7:30pm.

Venue:
5th Floor, Conference Room
CommVault Systems Pvt Ltd
Ashok Janardhan Chambers
1-10-72, S.P. Road
Begumpet
Hyderabad - 500016

Landmark:
CommVault is located in Ashok Janardhan chambers.
This is above Nalli Silks on S.P. Road, Begumpet.
The building is opposite Shopper's Stop.

This is a FREE event.

The Speaker is a software engineer with extensive background
in hacking. He has professional expertise in networking and
Operating Systems.

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.

Society helpline : +91 - 99496 50605

TWINCLING Society
freedom of innovation
http://www.twincling.org/

1st Sat - AppLabs and 3rd Sat - CommVault

2006-07-14T11:22:00.000+05:30

TSM (TWINCLING Saturday Meet) will be conducted at two sponsor locations.

1st Saturday of every month - AppLabs Technologies
Jubilee Hills Checkpost

3rd Saturday of every month - CommVault Systems
Begumpet (Above Nalli Silks)

In the event that a particular Saturday is part of long weekend,
the event will be advanced to the next Saturday.

This is based on -
. suggestions by valued Members
. offers by Sponsors
. and TWINCLING Society's continuous focus and efforts to reach out to maximum audience

The Society thanks all its patrons, sponsors, friends and well wishers.

TSM venue Sponsor - CommVault Systems

2006-07-14T08:31:00.000+05:30

In recognition of the Regular Meets conducted by the Society,
we have a new Sponsor organization in addition to existing sponsors.

CommVault Systems (India) Private Ltd
http://www.commvault.com/
CommVault is a Storage Management, Backup and Disaster Recovery
company incorporated in USA with its Global Development Centre
in Hyderabad, AP.

The Society Board sincerely thanks CommVault for providing
infrastructure (venue, projector) for TWINCLING Saturday Meets (TSM).

Unique Network Security Sessions

2006-06-16T13:30:00.000+05:30

TWINCLING Society has scheduled three Unique Network Security sessions on the following dates as part of its TSM (TWINCLING Saturday Meet) program.

Sat, June 24th, 2006
Firewall Rules for BroadBand Security

Sat, 1st July, 2006
IPsec, VPN

Sat, 15th July, 2006
SSL, OpenSSL, Digital Certificates

All Events will have live demonstration of vulnerability scenarios and how the current open source tools help address those concerns.

Here are resources to help you know more or participate in discussions,

TWINCLING Society list - join

TWINCLING Society website - visit

TWINCLING Society IRC node channel - #twincling

TWINCLING Society Helpline - +91 - 93930 11284

Sat - 24/6 - 10 am - TSM - BroadBand and DSL - Concepts & Configuration

2006-06-16T12:54:00.000+05:30

TWINCLING Saturday Meet (TSM) is scheduled to be held on
next Saturday, ie. 24/6/2006
from 10am - 12pm
at
3rd Floor, 3XL Conference Room
AppLabs Technologies, Jubilee Hills Post
on
BroadBand and DSL - Concepts and Configuration

Learn more about -
. Broadband technology basics
. What is Broadband connection
. Ethernet and DSL/ADSL
. Devices (Modems, Routers)
. Netgear Wirless Router
. Huawei Wireless Router
. Device Drivers, HotPlugging
. PPP, PPPoE
. Traffic shaping, bandwidth control
. Configuration settings for Linux, FreeBSD
. Internet Connection Sharing
. Firewall Rules for securing BroadBand
. Troubleshooting, Tips n Tricks

This is a FREE event.

See TSM-36 notification on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/twincling

TSM on 'AJAX' on Sat, 18th Feb 2005 at 10 am

2006-02-17T19:42:00.000+05:30

The topic for the next TWINCLING Saturday Meet (TSM) is
AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

Ajax is a web development technique for creating dynamic, interactive and richer Web client applications.
The intent is to -

shift great deal of the interaction to the Client machine (ie. user's computer).

exchange data with the webserver behind the scenes, so page reload does not happen for every change.

increase page interactivity, speed and usability.

The focus of the TSM will be -

understand Ajax architecture

introduce and discuss key technology components
- XHTML (markup)
- CSS (styling)
- DOM (object tree)
- JavaScript (script, event handling, controller)
- XMLHttpRequest (exchange data asynchronously)
- XML (dataset)

Ajax design patterns
- nested MVC
- display manipulation
- dynamic behaviour
- web remoting
- browser-server dialogue
- DOM population, manipulation

Ajax pros and cons

Lots of live demos to highlight and explain the concepts

You are invited for this interactive and exciting session.

TWINCLING Slides available online

2006-02-15T16:14:00.000+05:30

TWINCLING Saturday Meet (TSM) slides are available online on the main site.

The topics covered are -

Java 5 Prog Language

Concurrent Java 5 Prog

ISO C++

Python Prog Language

Security Assurance, GnuPG

Concurrent Versions System

Linux Filesystem Basics

Linux Firewall Architecture

Linux Systems Prog Basics

Understanding OpenSource

Please download the slide that you need.
The Society appreciates your feedback (info@twincling.org)

Web 2.0 Product Ideas

2006-01-23T22:43:00.000+05:30

This is a very interesting article on Web 2.0 published by OReilly.

The transition from the old web can be understood from the following mapping -

Web 1.0	Web 2.0
DoubleClick	Google AdSense
Ofoto	Flickr
Akamai	BitTorrent
mp3.com	Napster
Britannica Online	Wikipedia
personal websites	blogging
evite	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	search engine optimization
page views	cost per click
screen scraping	web services
publishing	participation
content management systems	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	tagging("folksonomy")
stickiness	syndication

Additionally, a critical study of this document would be helpful towards coming up with real smart Open Source product ideas whose implementation can establish TWINCLING Society among the likes of Apache, FreeBSD etc.

A face-2-face meeting is scheduled on 26th Jan at 10:30 am in Begumpet to discuss potential product ideas. Please call up +91-9441071232 in case you would like to join in for the meeting.

If we can articulate a 'TWINCLING Social Networking Platform' (TSNP), analogous to Eclipse Platform for technology or .Net platform for WebServices, then the next generation service(s) can be built, managed, deployed, aggregated and provisioned using this platform.

All the members of the Society are also invited to pool in their ideas and suggestions for the product.

The objective of the Society in 2006 is to kick-start a major, multi-year product development initiative which delivers on customer requirements that are just around the horizon !

Please send in your suggestions
All ideas and suggestions are very very very welcome !

Season's Greetings and Happy New Year 2006

2005-12-30T12:29:00.000+05:30

TWINCLING Society wishes all its 508 members
Season's Greetings and a very Happy and prosperous New Year 2006.

The Society will kick off many new activities and Open Source Product development initiatives in the new year 2006.

regards
TWINCLING Executive Team.

Open Source Round Up 2005

2005-12-09T21:36:00.000+05:30

The Society is organizing "OpenSource RoundUp 2005" on Saturday, 10th December, 2005 at 5pm.

The Round Up brings a panel of speakers together who present a pragmatic view of technologies and Industry trends that characterized the Year 2005. What makes this event unique is that all the speakers use Open Source technologies in their day to day work.

This is a great opportunity to
- hear about current Industry situation (technologies, opportunities)
- learn about key OpenSource technologies
- network with working professionals
- know about the upcoming projects
- catchup on hiring trends

The timings are 5:00pm - 7:30pm

The Venue is -

2nd Floor, Euclid India Pvt Ltd
Ashoka Janardhana Chambers
Above Nalli Silks
S.P. Road
Begumpet, Hyderabad

Helpline
94410 71232

Open Standards and Open Source

2005-09-01T12:08:00.000+05:30

The terms 'Open Standards' and 'Open Source' are regularly used in press and in conversation.

Unfortunately, on many occassions (esp conferences) the terms are miscontrued and lead to certain amount of confusion.

"Open Standard" refers to a uniform technical specification. Offcourse this refers to the process of development of the spcification as well.

TCP/IP, VoIP, SIP, XHTML, XML are all Open Standards, created jointly by various commercial, governmant and not-for-profit organizations under standards bodies like IETF, W3C etc.

However, Open Standards can have both proprietary and Open Source implementations.

"Open Source" refers to a software development and licensing model.

FreeBSD, FireFox (Mozilla), Apache web server, MySQL database server are some of the examples of Open Source software.

twincling executive team attends Novell OES & NLD launch

2005-05-06T23:38:00.000+05:30

The TWINCLING Executive Team attended the Novell Linux launch program conducted at Grand Kakatiya, Sheraton.

The Team interacted very closely with the IT Managers from Pharma, BPO, technology industries, System administrator, faculties from colleges and students.

During the course of presentation, quite a few critical points from customer perspective were raised by the Team.

TWINCLING Society is completely focussed on bringing the best of benefits to the customers when they deploy Linux kernel based services and solutions.

Product developer's Orientation Programme

2005-04-18T14:54:00.000+05:30

TWINCLING Society conducted a week long Orientation Programme for the Product Developers working on the various projects, beginning April 11, 2005.

The objective of the programme was to bring up the developer's to speed -
. in C and pointers
. compiler tool chain (gcc)
. debugging tools (gdb)
. standard POSIX api
. good programming practices

There was a special mentoring session conducted on -
. memory management
. memory leaks (causes and how to avoid them)
. memory allocations (stack, heap, data segment).

Coding session was conducted along with theoretical discussions.
The concepts were highlighted by executing the debug binary inside
gdb. As a result, each concept was visualized and verified in terms
of memory allocations, costs and associated trade-offs.

The discussion on 'scope' and 'extent' of variables and types was
particularly interesting.

The week long programme was covered in 20 hours.

OpenSource technologies seminar at MESCO Institute

2005-04-09T12:47:00.000+05:30

TWINCLING Society conducts OpenSource technologies seminar at MESCO Institute of Computer Science and Management.

The Institute has very well equipped computer laboratories.

The TWINCLING team was introduced to the principal by Mr. Sofi, head of CS Dept.

The OpenSource technologies seminar was attended by students of the CS Dept. and the faculty members of the Institute.

The session was very interactive with the students enthusiastically clarifying doubts
and participating in discussions.

The tone of the day was set by the presentation on opportunities in OpenSource.

Linux system multi-media capabilities (audio, video) and business applications were demonstrated to a very eager audience.

Linux development tools and Linux as a platform was compared with other platforms. The demonstration of the various tools was done as well.

The entire TWINCLING Team was felicitated towards the end of the Seminar.

The team thanks the MESCO Institute students for making the entire event a great success and a memorable one too.

twincling executive team attends IT conclave

2005-03-16T05:36:00.000+05:30

The twincling society Executive team attended My Hyderabad My Destiny IT Conclave, at Taj Krishna today.

The event was unique as captains of the IT industry and the government policy makers came together to review the progress and develop vision for the future development of IT in Hyderabad and AP.

The innauguration was done by Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy, Hon'ble CM of the state of Andhra Pradesh, India.

The event started off with keynote speeches by CEO of Satyam, Dell, Philips Software and STPI.

The high note of the day was "Bangalore vs Hyderabad" debate which drew in a lot of people and there was a vigorous but thoroughly enjoyable discussion.

The executive team members interacted with the MD and CEO of various IT companies, discussed the opensource value proposition, the opportunities for joint interaction and also chalked out the future plan of action.

Panel discussions were undertaken about the infrastructure, HR and quality of manpower. The participants were executive members from CA, Cognizant, IT Sec, Microsoft and principals from the various institutes.

The President of twincling society, Mr. Sasidhar Kalagara interacted with Mr. Naidu, Mr. Mohanty (IT Secretary) and Mr. SubbaRao G. (State CIO) and explained the opensource vision at twincling society and the contributions that it is making.

The valedictory address was given by Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu, ex-CM and leader of the Opposition.

The event was well attended and media report on the event can be read at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1052927.cms

twincling conducts Linux seminar at BRECW

2005-03-14T06:03:00.001+05:30

The twincling team conducted Linux seminar at BRECW.

Bhoj Reddy Engineering College for Women is a reputed college offering courses courses in various streams of engineering and IT. The college has about 2000 students on its rolls and provides good lab facilities.

The entire twincling team was received by the Head of Dept, CSE and introduced to Prof. S. R. Ramaswamy, principal of the college. Prof. Ramaswamy talked about his vision for the college, industry focussed course content and soft skills.

The seminar was held in the main Seminar Room and was attended by about 140 students.

The keynote talk titled 'The Art of the OpenSource' was delivered by Ms. Namita Iyer. She introduced the concept of opensource software and highlighted the evolution and contribution of leaders like Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Brian Behlendorf among others.

She talked about the 'Bazaar model' of development for Linux kernel. He highlighted the "category killer" products like Linux kernel, MySQL database, Apache httpd and BIND.

She mentioned some of the reasons for the success of opensource software:
. availability
. timescale
. product features
. talented software developers
. peer review
. adoption by researchers in diverse fields

She also brought to notice, the factors that can cause the failure of projects:
. technical (lack of code modularity, portability)
. management (lack of standards, no risk assessment, no measurable goals, bad coordination)
. resource availability (nobody to do mundane tasks like doc, testing, field support, i18n, l10n)
. too many demands and too few developers
. discontinuation of the project

Some of the above mentioned points presented a balance view of the situation at hand.

There was visible interest among the students and they raised interesting queries about opensource software security, development and vulnerability fixes. This was a very pleasing discussion since the students are aware of some of the core issues.

Sasidhar Kalagara delivered a talk on 'LAMP platform' and 'PHP5'. He highlighted the importance of service oriented architectures for todays marketplace. The key components of the L:Linux A:pache M:ySQL P:HP platform were highlighted and technical details were provided.

Sasi, involved the audience by pointing out feature comparisons between ASP, JSP, ColdFusion and LAMP/PHP technologies. He discussed PHP arrays construct in detail. He built up the interest of the audience to introduce them to PHP5 which has the following interesting features:
. excellent support for OOP
. completely rewritten MySQL extension
. interoperable XML tools (SimpleXML)
. Embedded database with SQLite
. Exception handling
. Iterators
. First class SOAP implementation

Some of the student sought clarifications on PHP vs ASP and MySQL vs Oracle in terms of technology, features and job opportunities.

A vote of thanks was tendered towards the close of seminar. After the seminar the speakers interacted with the students and addressed their queries. Overall it was a well attended and interactive seminar.

The twincling executive committee puts on record and tenders thanks to Mr. G. Ravinder Reddy and H.O.D. CSE Dept for working together to organize the event and the required infrastructure.

a gentle introduction to LAMP

2005-03-08T15:39:00.000+05:30

Hi,

Here is a gentle introduction to LAMP
(L:inux A:pache M:ySQL P:HP), P:ython or P:erl.

LAMP provides a web services delivery infrastructure
wherein the developer can build business services that solve
specific problems.

For starters,

L:inux system provides a robust and stable base.
It also has built-in firewall and networking capabilities

A:pache is a pre-forking Web Server that implements the
HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1 and CGI specs very closely.

It runs as a service (daemon) httpd whose service lifecycle
can be controlled by '/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd' script.

The functionality is configured in a conf(iguration) file
referred to as /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

It is shipped with a manual.

Relevant links are:
faq http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html
docs http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/
service http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/invoking.html
suexec http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/suexec.html
HTTP/1.1 http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html
CGI http://www.w3.org/CGI/

M:ySQL is high-performance relational database engine that implements
the SQL-92 std and also adds some of its extensions.

It runs as a service (daemon) mysqld whose service lifecycle
can be controlled by '/etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld' script.

A mysql client (mysql) is installed along with the server which
provides a shell like interface to mysql engine.

The conf(iguration) settings of MySQL are specified in the
'/etc/my.cnf' file.

It is shipped with a manual.

Relevant links are:
manual http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/index.html
tutorial http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/tutorial.html
books http://dev.mysql.com/books/index.html

P:HP is a C-like server-side scripting language that can be used to
create HTML-embedded dynamic web pages.

PHP is configured as a CGI module for security reasons and its
complete configuration settings can be specifed in the
'/etc/php.ini' file.

It is shipped with a manual.

Relevant links are:
manual http://www.php.net/manual/en/
faq http://in2.php.net/FAQ.php
langref http://in2.php.net/manual/en/langref.php
php-mysql http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mysql.php

Since most dynamic websites are data-driven, there is a need for a
well-defined 'data-access' interface that is usable in the server-side script.

'php-mysql' database interface is one such interface that provides PHP language bindings and translation. It modelled very closely around
the MySQL C api.

To read some interesting articles on LAMP, please visit www.onlamp.com
apache http://www.onlamp.com/apache/
mysql http://www.onlamp.com/onlamp/general/mysql.csp
php http://www.onlamp.com/php/

Hope the details above will help the interested folks get interested
in LAMP and also explore the technology.

Should you have any queries, please post them on twincling list.

twincling team excels at the Linux Workshop

2005-02-21T17:08:00.001+05:30

The twincling team conducted the Linux Workshop at Osmania University on Saturday, Feb 19, 2005.

It was a well attended event with about 85 participants from various colleges of Hyderabad.

The event planning committee of twincling had earlier taken the decision of presenting the Open Source value proposition as a theme for this event.

The talk on multibooting/GRUB was given by Namita Iyer and Ganesh B, both twincling members. The speakers presented the concept of booting, how the hard disk is understood (CHS, LBA modes) and the Master Boot Record (MBR). A detailed discussion was undertaken along with a lot of diagrams to ensure that the participants have first hand knowledge.

GRUB (Grand Unified Boot loader) was discussed next in detail. Namita discussed the various features of GRUB which included talking about network booting, remote booting. Ganesh extended the discussion further by talking about the various stages in GRUB namely stage 1, stage 1.5 and stage 2.

After the talk, the workshop was conducted where the participants did hands on using 'qemu' emulator booting FreeDOS and Damn Small Linux. The participants were visibly excited while trying out the program.

The entire twincling team of Sashidhar Kalagara, Martin Samuel, Namita Iyer and Saifi Khan worked with the participants and assisted them to get the GRUB commands right and boot up FreeDOS and Damn Small Linux. Ganesh the workshop lead was in his best 'tinker' elements and enthralled the audience.

Many of the participants tried out the various applications shipped with DSL (Damn Small Linux). In fact, some of the participants were comfortably playing games!

Based on the suggestion by OU/CSE Org Committee, Saifi undertook a short interactive discussion with the participants on 'Linux and OpenSource myths'. He talked about the practical concept behind Free Software and how it creates an ecosystem for multiple parties to develop software. He also talked about Open Source code security that is talked about a lot in popular press and the various opportunities. The concept of 'collaborative software' development was highlighted.

The participants asked many questions and also live polls were conducted on popular ideas about Free/Open software.

The final talk of the day was on the LAMP platform, A Linux web solution. This talk was given by Saifi Khan, a twincling team member.

Saifi highlighted the 'Services opportunity' over the development platform and the kernel. The Open Source software developers are interested in developing infrastructure services that are built on free and open standards. This helps in designing sophisticated service architectures that are both interoperable and integrable.

A keypoint of the talk was that 'Service Oriented Architectures have a pattern'. This powerful idea was demonstrated using the web (apache) server and the persistence (MySQL) server architectures.

The next important idea was that 'Server-Side scriptability' is a key enabler for better integration and rapid application development. The audience was introduced to the capabilities of PHP, Apache, MySQL and Linux.

LAMP based website management, content management, forum software were mentioned by way of illustration. It was also highlighted that L is (Linux, *BSD), A is(Apache), M is (MySQL, msql, PostgreSQL) and P is (PERL, Python or PHP).
So, the developers have a lot of choice and opportunities for developiing service oriented solutions.

Finally, the vote of thanks was tendered.

A lot of participants came up and raised queries with the twincling speakers. Many were seen exchanging contact information. The participants took home with them knoppix 3.7 distro, of which more than 75 copies were stamped by the twincling team members.

The twincling team is very pleased with the successful execution of the Linux Workshop.

multiple distros and value creation for customers

2005-02-09T12:32:00.001+05:30

The Linux system software space is characterized by multiple distributions or distros!

Some of the distros are:
YES
DeMuDi
Devil
Litrix
Redhat
Mandrake
Slackware
Debian
Ubuntu
PCQLinux
Yoper
Knoppix
Xandros
Linspire
etc. etc.

So, the question is, why do we have so many distros ?
Maybe a better question would be 'what makes a distro unique' ?

After all the distro guys just don't make up a distro, so that they have some fun and are through.

A distro
'targets' a customer segment,
'solves' a particular set of problems/issues
'envisions' what a customer would appreciate
'imagines' the relationship between the system and the user
'selects' the Linux packages that are put together to deliver value
'localizes' the interface for a given group or community and
'delivers' an .iso image burnt on a CD/DVD for the enduser

Since the various Linux developer folks are focussed on solving problems based
on some or all of these factors, there is immense creation of value for the customer
and an attendant evolution of the market place.

The customer gets to pick and choose packaged solution offerings based on her/his requirements and situations. The customer may begin with one distro and then move over to some other distro
depending on the evolution of her/his needs.

The creation of a 'market place' or 'bazaar' is essential, since that helps push up the quality of the software thats delivered to the customer. It is in these market/mindshare gains of the distros that the cummulative growth of Linux systems is achieved.

There is also "healthy" competition among the distro developers since all are seeking more market share (read customers) and mindshare (read customers).

Its the customer that matters and it is for the customer that we create value.

Welcome to the 'prgamatic' Linux and Open Source market place!

Linux Workshop

2005-02-07T10:00:00.000+05:30

The OU/Linux Workshop is scheduled to be held on
Feb 19 (Saturday) from 1000 - 1400hrs.

The plan for the Linux Workshop as worked out by 'twincling'
is as follows:

Proposed Plan:
To present the Linux/open source value proposition weaved
in a theme.

Infrastructure for (W)orkshop:
. distros (knoppix, Fedora Core-3)
. workshop mc. P4/128Mb/20Gb (40 machines)
. distros as take aways
. Linux quiz
. Linux written material

The core team at 'twincling' has planned the event in a very
interesting manner and please do make it a point to attend it.

Everybody is welcome to take a look at the archives of 'twincling'
to see how we are working, our planning, our efforts and most
important our committment to make the OU/Linux Workshop a great
success.

TWINCLING Society

2005-02-06T12:05:00.000+05:30

Hi:

TWINCLING Society is a professionally managed Linux Society in Hyderabad, AP, India.

The core team has envisioned a business plan to create and establish Hyderabad's first professionally managed Linux society that works with the various stake holders (students, business, linux enthusiasts, corporates) to deliver value through talks, events, software development and value based resource initiatives.

The blog will update the visitor on the various events, initiatives and knowledge based activities!

Welcome to TWINCLING Society