On Thursday, September 26, The Department Of Computer Science And Engineering, B.M.S. College Of Engineering, in association with Sun Microsystems organised a seminar and hands-on session of Open Source Software and the importance of student contribution in it. With a huge crowd, including many students from colleges like Dr.AIT, DSI, etc, the seminar started as per schedule at 9:00 A.M. with welcome from Rashmi, the college ambassador for Sun Microsystems in BMSCE, followed by the Head Of The Department, CSE, M.Indiramma and The Principal, B.M.S. College Of Engineering, who wished that everyone attending the seminar see their expectations fulfilled. (Owing to my weak memory, i cannot recollect the names of the brilliant people who came from SUN to demonstrate the technologies.) The first session was about what Open Source was about and how its important, followed by a session about Cluster Computing, the current research going on at SUN here.

After this, Santosh Vattam, ISE, 7th semester student demonstarted the cool effects an Open Source software called CompizFusion provided.Most of the audience who though Windows Vista had cool graphics, i'm sure, wouldn't be thinking the same after the session.Then, there was a session about Blender software which allows to easily render 3-D artwork and create movies.The sample movie shown was just brilliant, and people really liked it after a hi-fi session about Cluster Computing. This was followed by lunch.

After lunch, Madhusudan C.S. 7th sem, ISE student showed how easily content management systems like Drupal can be used to create blogs easily, “Creating a blog in 10 minutes”.This was followed by a session on NetBeans by Ashwin, IIIT-B which was very enlightening and amazing, and then the attendees were taken for a hands-on session in the ISE and CSE labs, where small Java snippets were practiced on NetBeans. I was excited to know how easily mobile apps can be made using NetBeans.Many participants (including me, yippe!!) got goodies for answering question during the sessions. On a whole, the day was everything, information about Open Source, Java and other cool Open Source software. (I couldn't take much photos in the auditorium, so couldn't add some here)