What: ‘Autodesk Live’, event for information about 2009 Autodesk Manufacturing Solutions When: 8th July 2008, 9:30am to 5:30pm Where: Le Meridien, Pune Registration: Free registration here.
‘Autodesk Live’ would give an idea on the kind of impact Autodesk 2009 will have on business. Focus will be on ‘Digital Prototyping‘ and how that can be used to:
Connect conceptual design, engineering and manufacturing teams through the use of a single digital model
Simulate complete product and better optimise and manage the design
Create accurate digital prototypes that enable to validate the design as one work, minimising the need for costly physical prototypes
Footprint Venture will be visiting Pune in next week, 3rd July. They are an early stage venture capital fund, based out of India. (http://footprintventures.com/index.htm ). I am trying to arrange their meeting with POCC members where they can informally interact with POCC member and talk for a few minutes on their prospective, what they look for, etc. The tentative plan is to have this meeting from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. The venue is TBD. I will confirm the venue and meeting in a few days. If anyone can arrange for place, it will be great.
Footprint is an early stage venture capital fund, based out of India. They are targeting entrepreneurs seeking Series A investment.
The fund is the brainchild of Neill Brownstein, a co-founder of Bessemer Venture Partners. It aims to invest in companies with a strong India focus, i.e. companies with offerings that are either exclusively for India or for India & international markets.
Yesterday, I live-blogged about Day 1 of this conference. That was more about the speeches given by dignitaries. Today I am attending one session, and this one promises to be more technical talks.
To refresh your memory, this is the Hi-Tech Pune Maharashtra 2008 organized by Suresh Kalmadi backed Pune Vyaspeeth, this is the 5th installment of this conference, and in addition to IT, the focus this time is on Bio-Technology and Animation. The conference is spread out over three days (18th June to 20th June) and there is a fairly interesting schedule of presentations by a diverse set of speakers.
I am live-blogging this conference so, 1) refresh on a regular basis if you’re reading this on Wednesday evening (Pune time), and 2) please excuse the terse and ungrammatical language.
I missed the morning sessions. There were two sessions on innovation (which I’m glad to have missed – I am bored of talks on innovation), one on biotech, and one that sounded very interesting – because it was case studies on animation (“Golden Compass”, “Tare Zameen Par”, “Little Krishna”) that was done out of Pune.
First up is P.S. Narayan, Head Sustainability Practice, Wipro, talking about “Does Green make business sense?” While a lot of the talk was general Al Gore-ish “you should help the environment” lecturing, there were a few points that I found interesting.
He is making the point that Green companies perform better. There are examples of businesses who focused on energy savings and managed to not just reduce energy costs, but also improved on a bunch of other measures. Also, he is showing that green companies do better on the stock market too. I’m not sure whether this is just correlation or there was some causation involved. (I mean it is possible that companies that think about going green, are also the same ones who are smart enough to reduce their costs, and the ones who are not going green are generally the companies that are not well run.)
What is Green IT? It’s not just designing your systems to consume less power. It is also about software solutions to reduce energy consumed in other parts of your company (e.g. did you think about re-designing your supply chain to minimize energy consumption?) Also, other things like green accounting (if your accounts department kept track of energy usage in addition to simply dollars spent, that would reduce consumption. Currently, most people don’t even know the details of their consumption.)
The next up is Dr. S. Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC with a talk entitled “From Innovation to Deployment: Case Studies from C-DAC”. In their Language Computing initiative they have designed more than 3000 TrueType and Unicode fonts for Indian languages. In Speech Technologies, they not only have to worry about speech-to-text of Indian languages, but also speech-to-text of Indian English! C-DAC’s ATCS (Area Traffic Control System) brings advanced concepts in traffic control to Indian conditions. It uses vehicle detectors to optimize traffic signals. These kinds of signals are only present in two place in India – Delhi (63 signals, imported from UK) and Pune (34 signals, developed by C-DAC). The signals are controlled from a central location using wireless communication – which is really good because it reduces road digging. (Anyone driving around Pune these days will know how big a deal this is.) There is also a telemedicine project but he did not get time to go into that.
Dr. Anupam Saraph, CIO of Pune, making a case for having strong IT in government in Pune. To allow growth faster than the 7% that we are currently experiencing (it should be double digits), but also to ensure that we do not run into the problems that are caused by the growth when it happens. After the initial pitch, he is jumping ahead and talking about his vision for Pune in 2015, and then following it up with the specific projects that he has initiated. He mentioned how this is a partnership between government and businesses – he sees how it is sustainable when someone is making money off these cool services. He also mentioned the Design for Pune competition (which I am working on) and PuneTech. Cool.
In the plenary session, Rohit Srivastwa, head of IT for the Commonwealth Games, and Airtight Networks, gave a talk on how information security is very important these days. He talked about ClubHack (an online community for bringing security awareness to common people). He pointed out to Anupam Saraph how some government websites had security loopholes. This led to a nice back-and-forth between the two of them about the need to balance security vs. use of new technology – a refreshing change from the blandness that afflicts other presentations. But while the session was interesting, I was not entirely sure why it was a plenary session, instead of being a presentation in one of the regular sessions.
Vijay Kumar Gautam, COO, Commonwealth Games, Delhi 2010, gave a brilliant speech about the use of IT in sports, and brought out very nicely the huge difficulties involved in managing the IT for a sports event. Imagine a company that has 50,000 employees, and 1 billion customers. The company is built from scratch in 3 years, and is operational for only 3 weeks. Unlike most other IT projects, the deadline does not slip – the dates are fixed and remain fixed. Unlike most other software products, you don’t get a chance to do a bugfix or a patch release. You don’t get a chance to tune your system based on experience in the field. You don’t have an alpha or a beta release. And now imagine 10,000 journalists following your every move and ready to report on every gaffe.
He gave some idea of the complexity of the whole set up – hardware, software, processes. I’d love to get my hands on his presentation, not sure where I can get it from. They are planning on using the Commonwealth Youth Games in Pune later this year as a Proof-of-Concept test ground for the system.
The most interesting thing he said was this – such games happen all the time. There are Olympics (summer/winter) every two year. There are Commonwealth or Asian games every two years. Take into account world championships and other events and you have games all the time. And, it is very difficult to find people who have the experience of building IT systems for such a requirement. And they charge astronomical rates. You should get into this business. That was the main thrust of his talk.
The Hi-Tech Pune Maharashtra 2008 conference got underway today. Organized by Suresh Kalmadi backed Pune Vyaspeeth, this is the 5th installment of this conference, and in addition to IT, the focus this time is on Bio-Technology and Animation. The conference is spread out over three days (18th June to 20th June) and there is a fairly interesting schedule of presentations by a diverse set of speakers.
I am live-blogging this conference so, 1) refresh on a regular basis if you’re reading this on Wednesday evening (Pune time), and 2) please excuse the terse and ungrammatical language.
The event is being live-webcast by the organizers. Go to the Pune Vyaspeeth homepage and click on the broadcast link at the bottom of the page.
The first day is mostly talks by dignitaries – Suresh Kalmadi, Jyotiraditya Scindia (Minister of State for Communications & IT Government of India), Dr. Ashok Kolaskar (VC UoP), Narayan Murthy, Dr. K. I. Varaprasad Reddy (MD, Shantha Biotechnics).
The talks:
Missed talks by Deepak Shikarpur, Suresh Kalmadi and Dr. Kolaskar
Anand Khandekar Director Pune Development Center & Chief Mentor NVIDIA: “Animation is going to be the next big thing. Especially in Maharashtra and Pune. And it is not restricted to the elite – it will create jobs for the rural sector too. The government must extend the same incentives for the budding animation industry as it did for IT industry earlier”
Mr. Ashish Kulkarni, CEO, BIG Animation: “Animation for a bunch of recent movies was done in Pune. Dashavatar, Golden Compass. All of the animation for the upcoming Krishna movie will be in Pune.
Lifetime achievement award for Narayan Murthy
Lifetime achievement award for Dr. Reddy.
Dr. Reddy heard comments that India was a beggar country begging for vaccines from the west. At that time one of the vaccines (I forgot which one) cost $28 – completely out of the reach of most of the poor Indians. Stung by the criticism, he gave up his career in Electronics and started Shanta Biotech. He tried to acquire the technology and was told by the company that recombinant DNA technology was so far ahead of the capabilities of Indian scientists that it would take them 20 years to absorb the technology – and hence there was no point in transfering the technology to India. Miffed, Dr. Reddy hired local scientists and developed the technology indigeneously in about 5 years and introduced it at a price of Rs. 50. Today it sells for Rs. 20.
But Dr. Reddy worries that the situation today is less than ideal. Due to the booming IT sector and the huge salaries offered there, people are no longer opting for careers in sciences. (At least not people that you would actually want to hire.)
Jyotiraditya Scindia: is a great speaker. Spoke very well about innovation. Spoke about India’s tradition of innovation and education. Said that in modern times, our temples should be the IITs and other great educational institutions. Spoke about the need for greater collaboration between industry and educational institutions. I am not doing justice to his speech – maybe someone else who attended will do that tomorrow.
William A. Haseltine, President, Haseltine Foundation: India is not a subset of the world. India is a representative of the world. You have everything, from large business, and high tech to tribals and poverty. You solve the problems in India and you solve the problems of the world.
The scheduled presentations are over and I am heading off to the “networking dinner”. I hadn’t expected on getting an invitation for this conference, so I have not really made place in my calendar for the attending the next two days of the conference. I might drop in for a couple of hours each day, but can’t stay the whole day. If anybody reading this is attending the conference and would like to write a report on the sessions, please let me know.
(This information was sent in by PuneTech reader Shardul Mohite)
CSI Pune presents What: Seminar on Google’s OpenSocial platform When: 6:30pm to 8:30pm, Friday 20th June, 2008 Where: Persistent Systems, “Bhageerath”, SB Road Who can attend: Free for CSI members, Rs. 100 for others. Registration will be at the venue
Details:
Writing Apps for Orkut and Other OpenSocial Containers
The web is better when it’s social
The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.
OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.
Many sites, one API
A common API means you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
Overview of the talk
What is OpenSocial?
OpenSocial current status
Building an OpenSocial Application
OpenSocial container
What is next for OpenSocial?
Where to find the information about OpenSocial?
About the speakers
Rajdeep Dua
Rajdeep is with Google Developer API Evangelism team working on OpenSocial Advocacy. He has around 10 years of experience in Middleware, Web Services and Integration space. Before joining Google he was leading development effort for CSF: Connected Services Framework Initiative in Microsoft India. He has also contributed to JBoss Open source development in the Past.
Rajdeep holds an MBA from IIM Lucknow, India.
Rohit Ghatol
Rohit is part of Google Developer API Evangelism team working on OpenSocial Advocacy and support. He carries around 6 years of experience in Java Enterprise and Web 2.0 technologies space. Before joining Google he was a Project Manager with a firm in Pune working exclusively on Ajax Technogoly.
PuneJava has a talk on agile development this Saturday at 6pm. (You should already know this; otherwise subscribe to PuneTech updates!) Just before that, at the same location, PLUG is holding its monthly meeting (see their website for details). Pune Flex Users Group is holding a meeting on Sunday at 5pm (see their wiki for details).
Also, the Pune OpenCoffee Club (for entrepreneurs, and others interested in the startup ecosystem in Pune) is planning on a meeting next weekend. Chip in on that discussion if you want to influence the time/location or agenda.
Update: Rohit points out in the comments that there’s a Pune bloggers lunch on Saturday at 12:30pm.
Session Overview : Agile is a way to quickly develop working applications by focusing on progressive requirement rather than processes. Agile development is done in iterative manner with short requirements, quick builds and frequent releases. Agile methodology when compared to traditional practices like waterfall model, makes development easier, faster and adaptive.
The session would provide a roadmap for building enterprise-class Java applications using agile methods. It would include introduction to agile methodology and when and why it should be used. Various practices used for agile development (Agile Modeling, Agile Draw, Agile estimation) would be discussed. Agile development based Case Study would be drawn using: Light weight technologies like Spring; ORM for database handling; Test Driven Development approach; Build management & Configuration control in concurrent development environment. Session would also include coding practices to make code adaptable to new requirements and tips for using IDE (Eclipse & Netbeans) for agile development.
Speaker Bio : Prerana Patil has over 5 years of experience of working with Java and Java Enterprise Applications. She is currently working in Technology Practice group of Oracle Financial Services (formerly i-flex solutions limited). She is a Masters in Computer Science from UOP and loves exploring the new things in software world. She has been involved in various trainings on Java, Java EE.
Posted on behalf of Anurag Agarwal of KQ Infotech. This is a paid training program. See the end of this article for fees and other logistics. Disclaimer: PuneTech does not accept any remuneration, monetary or otherwise, for publishing content. Postings of a commercial nature (e.g. paid training program) are posted solely on the basis of whether or not they fit in with the charter of PuneTech and whether the readers would find those interesting. Please let me know your views on this issue. I’m posting this one because it involves “deep” technology, I think it would be of interest to a number of PuneTech readers, and because I can recommend the program based on the reputation of the trainers.
Are you planning to make a career in development in Linux kernel but don’t have right skills?
Have you burned your fingers writing your own code in the Linux kernel?
KQ Infotech is launching a unique training and mentoring program for you. There are two parts to this program. First one is the forty hours intensive training and other one a long term mentoring.
Training will provide you a good understanding of all the sub systems of Linux. It will enable you to debug, modify Linux kernel and write various device drivers. There will be a number of theory sessions, practical sessions, peer code reviews and code walk through. All the assignments will be targeted towards specific Linux kernel functionalities.
But it is very unlikely that a forty hours training would be able to make you a good Linux kernel programmer. In the absence of a real Linux kernel project, it is very unlikely that you will become a good Linux kernel programmer. After forty hours training a special mentoring program will be launched for this purpose.
All the students will be provided with a medium term Linux kernel project. KQ Infotech will facilitate a two hour weekly meeting to discuss and solve this project related problems. This program will enable one to become a good Linux kernel programmer in three to six months time.
About the Trainers
We have 7 to 11 years experience in developing systems storage software and virtualization solutions at Symantec (formerly Veritas) and are well versed with the challenges and techniques for engineering in the kernel space. We believe that our strong development background on heterogeneous platforms (Linux, solaris and AIX) will enable us to give our audience a better perspective on developing in the Linux kernel.
Course Contents This course assumes good knowledge of C, familiarity with editors (vi/emacs) and basic concepts of user land and kernel space.
This course is designed for the people having their day job. This course will be delivered on Saturday and Sunday, for five hours each day. There will be assignments, code review, code walk through.
A brief overview of the course contents is below Day1: Introduction to Linux
Linux Kernel Features
Code layout
Build Linux Kernel
Introduction to the Kernel Module API
Legal Issues with Linux Kernel
Introduction to System Calls
Day 2: Process management and scheduling
Introduction to Process Management
Linux Kernel Order one scheduler
Fork system call
Signals and signal handlers
debugging techniques with Linux Kernel
Proc file system
Day 3: Synchronization
Important Data structures in the kernel
Synchronization primitives in the linux kernel
Day 4: Interrupts
Introduction Interrupts and ISRs
Introduction to bottom halves, tasklet
Day 5: File System
Introduction to VFS
ext2/ext3 filesystem
Day 6: Device Drivers
Introduction to character device drivers
Introduction to block device drivers
Day 7 and 8: Memory Management
Introduction to Linux Memory Management
Allocator, allocation schemes
Process view of memory, kernel view of memory
Drill down on x86 specific: L1, L2, TLB
Paging and swapping
Logistics:
First batch for this course will start from 7th June.
This course will be delivered at Pune IT park.
There will be five hours session on both Saturday and Sunday.
Fee:
There is one combined fee for training and mentoring program. It is 25,000/-. There is special discount of 20% for first batch. Fee for first batch will be 20,000/-.
T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa, gave talk on what he sees as challenges in storage/ILM. New requirements coming from the customers – Huge amounts of user-generated unstructured data in enterprises. Must manage it properly for legal, security and business reasons. Interesting new trends coming from the technology side – new/cheap disks. De-duplication. Storage intensive apps (eg. video). Flash storage. Green storage (i.e. energy conscious storage). SaaS and storage in the cloud (e.g. Amazon S3). Based on this, storage software should focus on these things: 1. Increase Information content of data 2. Improve security. 3. Reduce legal risk. Now he segues into a pitch for Mimosa’s products. i.e. You must have an enterprise-wide archive: 1. continuous capture (i.e. store all versions of the data). 2. Full text indexing of all the content and allow users to search by keyword. 3. Single instance storage (SIS) aka De-duplication, to reduce the storage requirements. 4. Retention policies. Mimosa is an archiving appliance that can be used for 1. ediscovery, 2. recovery, 3. end-user searches, 4. storage cost reduction.
Then there was a presentation from IBM on General Parallel File System (GPFS). Parallel, highly available distributed file system. I did not really understand how this is significantly different from all the other such products already out there. Also, I am not sure what part of this work is being done in Pune. Caching of files over WAN in GPFS (to improve performance when it is being accessed from a remote location) is being developed here (Ujjwal Lanjewar).
There was also a presentation on the SAN simulator tool. This is something that allows you to simulate a storage area network, including switches and disk arrays. It has been open-sourced and can be downloaded here. A lot of the work for this tool happens in Pune (Pallavi Galgali).
Bernali from Coriolis demonstrated CoLaMa – a virtual machine lifecycle manager a virtual machine lifecycle manager. This is essentially CVS for virtual machine images. A version management software to keep track of all your VM images. Check out image. Work on it. Check it in. A new version gets stored in the repository. And it only stores the differences between the image – so space savings. It auto-extracts info like OS info, patchlevel etc.
Coriolis’ was the only live demo. The others were flash demos which looked lame (and had audio problems). Suggestion to all – if you are going to give a flash demo, at least turn off the audio and do the talking yourself. This would involve the audience much better.
Abhinav Jawadekar gave nice introductory talk on the various interesting technologies and trends in storage. It would have been very useful and helpful for someone new to the field. However, in this case, I think it was wasted on audience most of who’ve been doing this for 5+ years. The only new stuff was in the last few slides that were about energy aware storage (aka green storage). (For example, he pointed out that data-center class storage in Pune is very expensive due to the high storage costs – due to power, cooling, UPS, genset, the operating costs of a 42U rack are $800 to $900 per month.)
The panel discussion touched upon a number of topics, not all of them interesting. I did not really capture notes of that.
Overall, it was an interesting evening. With about 50 people attending, the turnout was a little lower than I expected. I’m not sure what needs to be done in Pune to get people to attend. If you have suggestions, let me know. If you are interested in getting in touch with any of the people mentioned above, let me know, and I can connect you.
