Tag Archives: user groups

Microsoft Community Days: “Safeguarding your Applications” – 28 Feb

Events, , , , ,

Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User GroupWhat: A half-day event by the Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group (PUG) on security issues in safeguarding your applications
When: Saturday, 28th February, 9:45am-3:30pm
Where: Kalpa Banquet and Party Hall, E-101, Kumar Business Court, near SKC Mall, Mukundnagar, Pune
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. Register here.

Details – Safeguarding your applications

Information security
Image via Wikipedia

Fundamentals of Security: 40 Minutes
Common attack patterns, data classification, and security data in storage/in transit

Authentication: 40 Minutes
HTTP Basic/Digest/Kerberos, forms authentication, and .NET framework identities and principles

Authorization: 40 minutes
Common authorization techniques, principles of least privilege net role based security, and code access security

Input Handling: 120 Minutes
Cross-site scripting (XSS), persistent XSS, non-persistent XSS, SQL injection, one-click attacks, XML and XPATH injection, canonicalization issues, file upload/creation, and exception management

Logging & Auditing: 20 minutes

Q&A: 30 Minutes

About the Speaker – Sachin Rawat

Sachin Rawat is the co-founder of Crypsis, which offers consulting and training in the field of Information Security, Hi-Performance Computing (CUDA) and Software Development. Crypsis has offerings built around Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle which includes Threat Modeling, Design Review, Code Review, Deployment Review and Pen-testing. Crypsis offers Vulnerability Assessment and Security Audit Services for the IT infrastructure of organizations and is developing a product addressing visual media piracy detection.

Sachin has earlier worked as a Security Engineer with the Microsoft ACE
Team, where he worked on application security assessment for LOB applications.

He holds a B.Tech. (CSE) from IIIT-Hyderabad and has cleared ISC2’s CISSP certification exam. He was the only student among the top 10 winners of Security Shootout Competition organized by Microsoft, which had over 30,000 participants across India.

About Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group

”’Pune User Group”’ is a local user group of developers interested in Microsoft technologies and platforms. It has an informational portal with very active forums, it holds monthly user group meetings, an annual developers conference, and it also has a number of special interest groups.

For more details see the PuneTech wiki profile of PUG.

For other tech events coming up in Pune, see the PuneTech calendar. See also other PuneTech articles tagged: PUG, and Microsoft.

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Top 5 reasons why students should gate-crash Drupal Camp India – Jan 31

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Drupal
Image via Wikipedia

On Saturday, 31st Jan, from 10am to 5pm, 100s of Drupal enthusiasts will descend upon SICSR. It is a free (un)conference for Drupal developers, and entry was given a first-come-first-served basis. But as of this writing, Drupal Camp is full. However, Tarun Chandel, the god-father of all Pune unconferences, is encouraging everyone to gate-crash, and land up there, with or without registrations, and PuneTech fully supports him, (and so does Amit Kumar Singh, a.k.a. thecancerus).

That’s right – gate-crash, like uninvited wedding guests. It’s free, and it’s an unconference. Gate-crashing will actually be in the spirit of the event.

And if you are a student, then you must go, because in that one day, you will get more education than an entire month of your so-called classes.

With this in mind, here are PuneTech’s top 5 reasons why students must gate-crash Drupal Camp

  • Surprise your future employers: If you are in software, no matter what job you get, sooner or later you will be asked to build or oversee the building of a website, and there you should surprise everyone by having it ready, singlehandedly in one week as against their projections of 2-months using 3 people.
  • Beat the recession: As IT budgets get cut around the world, the web-development community will be hard hit, and companies will look to reduce spending on expensive web development. That’s why you should become a ninja at inexpensive web development using Drupal and its wide array of readymade modules.
  • Use this knowledge when you don’t get a job: Hey, let’s face it, if you are a student right now, it is very likely that you are not getting campus placement this year (or if you have been placed already, there’s a chance that it will get delayed or canceled). Instead of sitting around moping, the smart thing to do would be to start your own website and get to work for yourself. And for this, events like Drupal camp are great, for knowledge, for ideas and for contacts. For more reasons, see “Top 10 reasons why now is the best time to start a business with Drupal.”
  • Because you can: Think of all the poor little underprivileged students in Bangalore/Delhi/Hyderabad/Mumbai who cannot attend Drupal camp even if they want to. Because Drupal camp doesn’t happen in Bangalore. It doesn’t happen in Mumbai. It’s happening in Pune, and you are getting it free. Don’t give up this chance, because in the future, you (or your employer) will be charged exorbitant amounts for events like these, and you’ll still not be able to go because you have a stupid deadline.
  • Because PuneTech said so. And Amit Kumar Singh said so. And Tarun Chandel said so. And, I’m sure Rohit Srivastwa will say so as soon as he reads this. Seriously, you need to start listening to these guys.

If you are already going for Drupal camp, then please add to the list of reasons in the comments below.

Drupal Camp details:

What: Drupal Camp India ’09. Drupal Camp is a free, unconference, being conducted in Pune, with the objective to build up the community base and bring people closer. Details.
When: Saturday, 31st January, 10am to 5pm
Where: SICSR, 1st floor, Atur Centre, Gokhale Cross Road, Model Colony, Pune. Map.
Fees and Registration: This event is free for all to attend. Register here. Or not!

More from the website:

Drupal camp pune is an effort to pull in all drupal developers located in india to come together and cherish this wonderful CMS cum application framework. More than the sessions, its about interacting with fellow drupalers and listening to their experiences. This doesn’t discount us to not prepare session list, On our menu we have things like:

1> Advanced Module development
2> Site auto configuration using patterns.
3> Insight into Galaminds.
4> Managing staging,production and live sites specially syncing with Migraine.
5> Drupal on EC2
6> Case study on ILoveBolly

and much more…

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NULL.co.in Monthly Meeting on Computer Security: Saturday Jan 10

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What: Monthly meeting on Network Security by security awareness group “Null”
When: Saturday, 10st January, 6pm
Where: IMED, More Vidyalaya, Paud Road, Pune
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. No registration required.

Details:
Agenda of the meet:
1. Discuss the AntiPhishing Project.
2. Discuss the Clubhack IAS project.
3. Presentation on Stack Smashing/Shellcoding.
4. Planning for our next Event.
5. What to and how to of our meets.

For the other 4 tech events happening this weekend, check the PuneTech calendar.

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PUG Community Day: NAP with Windows Server 2008

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What: Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group Community Day featuring a presentation on NAP with Windows Server 2008
When: Saturday 10 January, 6pm onwards
Where: SEED Infotech Ltd., Nalanda, S No – 39, Hissa No – 2/2, CTS 943, Opp Gandhi Lawns, Erandwana, Pune 411 004,
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. No registration required.

(For a list of “competing” tech activities in Pune this weekend, see the PuneTech calendar)

About the speaker – Abhishek Pradhan

Abhishek is in Information Security (SIR Specialist). He is currenly working with Symantec India, and has around 5 yrs of expertise on various Server Technologies and on Microsoft domain.

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Peepaal – Bringing Industry and Academics Together

In Depth, Overviews, , , ,

improving engineering education in PuneThis is the third in PuneTech’s Improving Education series of posts detailing the efforts being taken by people in the tech industry in Pune to give our students a chance at giving their career a solid foundation by acquiring skills that are valued in the industry with guidance from experienced mentors from the industry. The first in the series was Techstart.in, a program to nurture the passions of students by guiding them to implement specific, and interesting projects. The second was KQInfoTech’s Post Graduate Diploma in Systems Programming where the students don’t actually pay for the course, but end up being funded by industry in return for completing projects.

The third is “Peepaal – Continuous Community Learning” is an online and offline community of industry professionals, college faculty, and students that aims at providing continuous guidance to students through knowledge, best practices and processes. This is a description of Peepaal in the words of one of the founders:

1. Introduction – Bringing Industry and Academics Together

Bill Gates (Windows) , Steve Jobs(Mac, iPod, iPhone), Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google), Orkut Büyükkökten (Orkut), Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook) , Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail)  apart from being successful have one important fact in common. They were all young when they dreamed of transforming the world into a better place to live. The truth is the pioneers in the technology field have been youngsters who have time and again brought new path breaking perspectives and solutions.

After 25 years in the IT field India has become the outsourcing hub of the world albeit with some deficiencies. On the pioneering front we are still some steps behind. Why in spite having such a large pool of vastly talented students are we still lagging behind? This is a million dollar question. But the answer to the question is easy.

Our students have always learned in a vacuum far away from the reality. Firstly they only have a very distant view of the needs of the industry and secondly they have passive view on the problems faced by the people and society. Good industrial skills are needed to become successful professionals of the IT industry.  Identifying practical problems and solving them will make the leaders and pioneers of tomorrow.

Peepaal aims to become that easily accessible Bridge between the students and the industry. Peepaal aims to become that great ladder on which the pioneers and leaders of tomorrow will climb and make a difference to the society we live in. Peepaal aims to become that Guru who will always show the right path to the students. Peepaal aims to become that Family who will nurture the students to become as independent as possible. Peepaal aims to become that Friend who will bring students with similar thoughts and interest together.

2. Do our talented students need improvement? Can it be done?

The Peepaal initiative was born out of our various interactions with students, faculty and our experience with freshers entering the industry. Each of these experiences reemphasized the significant need for Industry to provide a very strong collaborative role in shaping students and supporting faculty in delivering industry relevant knowledge to students to ensure they are more well rounded professionals by the time they enter the industry. It was also clear that this is not possible without continuous support from the industry and a collaborative model for delivering knowledge, best practices and processes.

While there are a number of areas that require focus we have identified some core focus areas for Peepaal and use projects as a mechanism for being able to deliver these improvements.

Why Projects? Well Projects have been something the students have been actively working on during their course curriculum and their is a significant focus on projects among students and faculty and we think it is a great mechanism to deliver knowledge. The issue however is that the current process of executing projects leaves a lot to be desired.

We expect to significantly alter the way student projects are executed and help them in the following:

  • Innovate: Projects can be a key medium to innovate and learn new ideas and principles and apply them in real world. We expect Peepaal guided projects to be able to help students to Innovate in the real world and follow cutting edge technology trends. In addition we believe the core CS fundamental concepts are key to ensuring that students deliver value from their project. Concepts like Data Structures, DBMS, operating Systems for example have to be understand and applied well on projects so that students learn by doing.
  • Execute: If a project does not succeed, the value of the effort is reduced to naught and it turns into an academic exercise. There are various industry proven methods like “Proof of Concept” implementation which helps support this. We expect the Peepaal Barcamps and the online portal to serve as checkpoints and support mechanism to significantly increase the number of successful projects.
  • Showcase: While an Idea looks great on paper and even after it is successfully executed it all boils down to how well you can showcase it. This applies to student projects as well. There is a considerable lack of awareness of the need and techniques to successfully showcase a project to an audience. Through a continuous stream of Barcamps and presentations we expect to significantly raise the bar on project presentations.

3. Objectives of Peepaal

How does Peepaal plan to solve the problem areas? Following are the high level steps Peepaal is undertaking at a brisk pace:

  • Establish strong collaboration between students and the industry to bring the students into reality.
  • Establish strong collaboration between students in various campuses.
  • Engage the faculty in healthy discussions and suggest solutions to the problems they face to enable successful projects.
  • Help students in the entire life cycle of their projects.
  • Provide technical and industrial knowledge,best practices to the students in an easy to understand format.
  • Compliment the students academic education with the learning and applications of the latest trends and technologies.
  • Provide guidance to the students in every manner so that they do not have to reinvent the wheel like the students of the past.
  • Encourage innovative ideas from the students that will have profound effect on the society we live in.
  • Encourage discussions so that students open up to share problems and seek solutions.

4. Peepaal Online Portal

Peepaal online portal http://www.peepaal.org/campus provides the much needed platform where the students, faculty and the industry come together. Following are the objectives it aims to meet:

  • Establish a strong communication mechanism between the students and the industry. Students, Faculty post questions on the discussion forums and the industry experts answer them in a simple easy to understand format.
  • Provide Students with articles that give them insight on the latest trends and technologies.
  • Prevent Students from re-inventing the wheel by suggesting them right tools,techniques and designs.
  • Provide Students with a forum to improve their interpersonal skills.
  • Provide industry experts a simple way to interact with students instead of visiting their colleges.
  • Provide industry experts to talk to a greater audience and use this greater audience in useful ways.
  • Community features that will get students with like thoughts together.

5. Peepaal Barcamps

Peepaal Barcamps are an innovative process model to guide the students in the entire life cycle of their project. Peepaal aims to be as close to students as possible in this regard. Peepaal engages face to face with the students during the course of their project through various Project BarCamps and campus events.

We have already conducted a number of BarCamps in the first season where we addresses close to 1000 students across various colleges across Pune. Starting January we will conduct an additional 18 Barcamps across 10 colleges in Pune where expect to work with close to 1500 students on their projects.

Some of the colleges that we are currently work with include Symbiosis, Nowrosjee Wadia, PICT, MIT, VIT, Fergusson, Modern, SP College.

6. Peepaal Linked-in community

Peepaal has setup a linked in community. This is the place where the industry experts, students and faculty will get together for discussions and debates. These discussions will give Peepaal great insights into the initiative and further improving the initiative.

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/1454357/1D32262ADD49

7. Get Involved !!!

All of us are aware that our educational system needs a lot of support if we want to sow the seeds for transformation in society for the future. The source for innovation and execution lie in our future students and it is all of us as experienced professionals who are best suited to provide this support. All it would take is a few hours of your time online or offline to make this impact. You can join us in our discussions online, on the portal, in the linked in community or join us for the Barcamps.

The number of Industry professionals have grown rapidly since we have started and we have close to 50 Industry professionals registered for the initiative and over 800 students impacted by the program. We do however need a lot more industry participation to ensure we have significantly broader impact across a larger number of students. If you are an Industry Professional, Faculty or a student and if all of this makes sense to you and you would like to join us on this initiative drop us a line at peepaalcampus@gmail.com and we would be happy to meet up with you to get started.

What to expect – Industry Professionals

An industry professional who wants to get involved with Peepaal should expect to:

  • Conduct Mock Interviews
  • Discuss and Refine Project Ideas
  • Mentor Projects Online
  • Own Technical Focus Areas
  • Drive Technology Trends
  • Support Campus Contact Programs
  • Collaborate with your campus
  • Discuss and Collaborate with Peers online

All you need is 2 hours a week

What to expact – Students

A student who gets involved in Peepaal can expect the following help:

  • Prepare for Placements
  • Identify, Plan and Execute Projects
  • Identify Technical and Soft Skill Needs
  • Showcase Competencies
  • Understand Technology Trends
  • Plan and execute Barcamps
  • Collaborate with Industry Experts
  • Discuss and Collaborate with Peers online

All you need is a few hours a week.

Related links:

Know any other Pune initiatives that belong to this series? Let us know.

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Network Security Workshop by “Null” – Dec 21

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What: Workshop on Network Security by security awareness group “Null”
When: Sunday, 21st December, 10am to 1:30pm
Where: I2IT, Hinjewadi
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. No registration required.

Details:

Null, a Network Security
group, is organizing an event on the 21st of December, 2008 at
International Institute of Information Technology, Hinjewadi, Pune.

The seminars which would be held are as below:

Time

                  Workshops                 

Speaker

10 AM – 10:30 AM

Introduction to Null
and Network Security

Mr. Aseem Jakhar

10:30 AM – 11:30 PM

Wireless Security

Mr. Rohit

11:30 PM – 12:30 PM

Application Security

Mr. Ajit Hatti

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

TCP/IP and NMAP

Mr. Murtuja

Null is a Network Security community for ethical hackers, security
professionals and security enthusiasts, born out of the need for a centralized
knowledge base in security and the fact that security is treated as an add-on
and ignored many a times. It is a step to move towards immunity from security.

Apart from having fun, we also:

–          Share security related knowledge

–          Create a disclosure platform

–          Design/Develop innovative ideas to combat current threats

–          Define a “Must-Have” security knowledge-base for different roles (programmers, QA, admin, end user)

–          Spread security awareness

–          Organize Meetings/Conferences/Training

For further information:

–          Contact: Mr. Aseem Jakhar ( giimale@gmail.com )

–          Visit the website: http://null.co.in

Speakers

1. Aseem Jakhar (Founder: NULL security community)
A network security and open source enthusiast (and a system programmer
for living). He has contributed to the development of various security products
and networking/security modules including:

– Firewall
– Regex filters.
– Baysian filters.
– Heuristic filters.
– Genetic Algorithm based score generator for heuristic filters.
– Advanced attachment filters.
– Multicast packet-reflection daemon.
– SMTP engine.
– DNSBL engine.

Aseem is an active speaker at security/open source conferences like Blackhat
Europe 2008, ClubHack 2008, Gnunify 2007. He was also invited to speak at
Inbox/Outbox UK 2008. He is a C|EH from Ec-Council and is actively involved in security research. He has also given security advisories
to various organizations including banks.

2. Murtuja Bharmal (Co-founder – NULL)
Murtuja is a Linux Kernel and Network Security
maniac. Earning livelihood by working as a System Programmer. He has been
contributing in development of various Network Security
products like Firewall, VPN, Application Proxies, and Authentication
Modules for the past 5 years. Murtuja is a C|EH from EC-Council, is
actively involved in Security practices, development, consultancy, with
prestigious organizations. He has single handedly developed firewall product
and got it compliant with ICSA-Labs and also has expertise in
customization, security patching and integration of open
source products like SQUID, IPTables,
VRRP, and OpenSwan.

3. Rohit Srivastwa (Member – NULL)
Founder of ClubHack, has several years experience in providing consultancy and
training in the fields of Information security, Cyber Crime Investigation and Penetration Testing. He
is actively involved advising and teaching several military agencies, law enforcement
personnel, Corporates and Government bodies in these fields

4. Ajit Hatti (Member – NULL)

Ajit Hatti is a “Software Architect &

System Programmer” by profession and “Network Security, Linux Enthusiast”. From last 4 years he has been
contributing in research & development of security products like
IPS/UTM/Mail Security & Network Scanners with various renowned
Organizations. Ajit is also actively contributing in vulnerability research of
various protocol implementations and has been researching on modern techniques
of Fingerprinting & Application/OS detection. Ajit is also associated with
PLUG, CSI, and Ubuntu’s development and testing.

OpenSocial Developers Conference in Pune – 20th Dec

Events, , , , ,

What: A conference for all OpenSocial Developers
When: 20th December 9:30am to 6:30pm
Where: Tower C, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada Pune – 411006      View Map
Registration and Fees: This is a free conference, but attendance is by invitation only. If you register now, you might still get an invitation.

Details:

A group of OpenSocial enthusiasts from Pune have come together to create this conference. The event is aimed to unite all the OpenSocial Application Developers from all over the country and just share/code/have fun and maybe inspire others to take up OpenSocial Development.

This event will also help towards awareness of OpenSocial and building a strong OpenSocial developers community.

Who should attend?

Anyone who developed any application based on OpenSocial platform or anyone who want to learn how to create OpenSocial Applications.

What’s the menu?

There are two tracks of speakers going on at two different halls. See the detailed schedule for more information. Another section is dedicated to codelab. A few developers will develop an application for the “India I Care” NGO. If you want to participate, just the organizers know on the Developer Garage Mailing list. At the end there will be an “Application show case” where OpenSocial application owners can demo their application.

Blogging and Twittering

Follow @devgarage on twitter for official Developer Garage updates. In general, people blogging or tweeting about this event are expected to use the odgpune tag, which means that searching for this term will give you everything you wanted to know about this event. (And please use that term in your own blogs or tweets.)

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DOs and DONTs for startups from a 4-time entrepreneur – 20 Dec

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Pune’s Universities have given the world some of its best minds, and we are fortunate that they take time out of their busy schedules to visit Pune. And when that happens, we must grab that opportunity to learn from their experiences. One such distinguished alumnus of Pune is Nickhil Jakatdar, successful serial entrepreneur. Nickhil has successfully sold 3 startups, and is now on to his 4th one. The Pune OpenCoffee Club has arranged for a talk by Nickhil at 5:30pm on Saturday, 20th December, at SICSR, Model Colony. He will talk about the DOs and DONTs for startups, with anecdotes supporting each one of them based on his vast experience.

Chetan Pungaliya, co-founder of Kaboodle, (and himself a successful entrepreneur), says this about Nickhil:

Nickhil is a great guy to listen to. He is an advisor and friend to startups in the US and India. I personally find Nickhil’s experiences insightful and it is always a pleasure talking to him. He has done talks like these in Berkeley, Stanford, Symbiosis and COEP in the past and people love it. Even though this is last minute, you should definitely try to attend the talk.

Here are some highlights of Nickhil’s background:

  • Nickhil is currently the CEO and Co-founder of mobile video search and delivery startup Vuclip. For details, see TechCrunch Mobile’s interview with Nickhil.
  • Earlier, Nickhil was the President and COO of Praesagus, a MIT incubated start-up that he helped grow to becoming the most widely used design-to-manufacturing modeling software in its class, before its acquisition by Cadence Design Systems. Post-acquisition, Nickhil became Engineering Group Director at Cadence where he ran the entire Manufacturing Modeling Group.
  • Nickhil helped found and served on the board of directors of CommandCAD, an electrical CAD company that was acquired two years after its founding.
  • Nickhil co-founded Timbre Technologies, a semiconductor manufacturing start-up, that won the first-ever Berkeley Business Plan competition, leading to a successful venture-backed financing. Nickhil served as CTO and VP of Marketing and Products as the company grew to become the industry standard in the field of scatterometry, before being acquired by Tokyo Electron Ltd. Nickhil remained at TEL for 3 years as Sr. Director of Technology and Marketing.
  • Nickhil has an M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has been the recipient of many awards from various organizations, including the IEEE Best Paper Award in the area of Transactions in Semiconductor Manufacturing for 2001, the Berkeley Distinguished Pioneer Award, the NSF and MICRO fellowships.
  • Nickhil is a student of COEP, and had won the Most Outstanding Student award when he graduated.
  • Nickhil has been featured in several articles published in the United States and in India.
  • Nickhil has to his credit more than 30 patents and 20 conference papers.
  • Vuclip was earlier known as blueapple.mobi – and that was a bad business decision, and they ended up having to change their name to vuclip.com. Can you guess why?
  • Vuclip went from a few thousand users to over a million users in just a few months, without any advertising. How?

Details:
What: Presentation by Nickhil Jakatdar, “DOs and DONTs for Startups”
When: 5:30pm, Saturday 20th December
Where: 7th follor, Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Chambers, Model Colony, Pune. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. No registration required.

Please forward this to anybody who might be interested in one day starting their own startup.

Be informed of such distinguished visitors and other tech events in Pune by subscribing for our PuneTech updates via RSS, Email, twitter, or SMS.

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POCC Meeting Report – SEO, Web Scalability and Olio

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Dhananjay Nene wrote this detailed report on the Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting last Saturday, which covered Search Engine Optimization by Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, and Web Scalability by Hashamkha Pathan of SUN. We have reproduced it here with his permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.

Went to the Pune OpenCoffee Club meet yesterday. It was supposed to focus on Search Engine Optimisation, Web Scalability and Sun Startup Essentials Program.

Search Engine Optimisation – Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Dimakh Consultants

I really liked this session. It is always refreshing to see a very down to earth speaker explain things broken down in a very simple way (tinge of jealousy at my end ?). While I feel like a ??? ????? (half doctor or amatuer) on this topic since I know only parts of it, I came back with some more insights into the space and some comfort in knowledge that the little I knew wasn’t way off the mark.

Anyways, here’s what Dimakh had to say on the topic :

Make sure you know what keywords you are conducting the SEO. Don’t forget the site name itself in the process. For good SEO, focus on the following issues (listed in a descending priority as per Dimakh, he said Google hasn’t ever published the priorities)

  • Content : It is important to make sure your content is in tune with the desired topics and keywords. Make sure the keywords (and sometimes even the phrases) you want to optimise for are covered in the content. Google does look at the keyword density in the content and that can influence your site rankings.
  • Domain : It is preferable to have the important word or two about your site in the domain itself. eg. You may consider having a site domain as sushrut-icecream-parlour.com instead of sushrut.com (I am not sure if he would’ve preferred the hyphens there – just applying my own thoughts here).
  • Filename : Make sure your filenames (ie. those in the URL) actually reflect the content.
  • Tags : Ensure that the tags (meta?) reflect the content appropriately
  • Alt Tags : Use the alt tags to enrich the information available to the search engine to better understand the images or hyperlinks. Keep them short but give enough info to the search engine eg. in a link to a file called enquiry.html, have the alt tag mention “Enquiry for Motors”.
  • Internal Links : Make sure it is easy for the spider to traverse through your site using the various links. Sometimes you may want to provide an alternative navigation mechanism if the default mechanism is not easily understood by a search engine (I assume he was referring to things like a Flash based navigation)
  • External Links : I really couldn’t understand what he implied here (probably because I got a little lost into thinking when I should’ve been listening), but some could help fill out the stuff in the comments below.

Finally Dimakh mentioned Seo Root and Google Rankings as sites to visit for further learnings. On the whole a very helpful session. One more karma point Pune Open Coffee Club earned in my books.

Web Scalability by Sun Microsystems :

(I missed the first couple of mins, hence didn’t catch the presenter names). (The presenter was Hashamkha Pathan from Sun. -Navin) The presentation focused on a toolkit designed for prototyping various technical and architectural issues around web 2.0 applications called Olio. Its a very nice and capable tool which in the words of the web site can be used for the following activities :

  • Understand how to use various web2.0 technologies such as AJAX, memcached, mogileFS etc. in the creation of your own application. Use the code in the application to understand the subtle complexities involved and how to get around issues with these technologies.
  • Evaluate the differences in the three implementations: php, ruby and java to understand which might best work for your situation.
  • Within each implementation, evaluate different infrastructure technologies by changing the servers used (e.g: apache vs lighttpd, mysql vs postgre, ruby vs Jruby etc.)
  • Drive load against the application to evaluate the performance and scalability of the chosen platform.
  • Experiment with different algorithms (e.g. memcache locking, a different DB access API) by replacing portions of code in the application.

An excellent piece of content that was poorly targeted imho. Sun has an extended amount of experience dealing with enterprise architects, and this was a really wonderful presentation which most enterprise architects would’ve understood easily. This particular community of people often need to do their homework very well, and usually are allowed a fair amount of time and money to do their homework, and in many cases also have access to a body of people who are also equally capable in working out various issues related to architecture.

I really think this is a useful tool which can be used by startups but that they shall need to spend the time to understand the tool and what it could do for them. However it is not a point and shoot kind of a tool. Based on the questions I could very easily understand that most persons very quickly ended up assuming that the tool could do much more than what the tool authors ever intended, and then felt disappointed. This was really a situation of positioning gone awry and I think Sun will need some more effort in positioning the presentation in its early stages to prevent disappointment later.

Finally as in a question I did ask quite explicitly, the reason why it makes sense for Sun to invest in and open source such a tool, is that this tool really forces you to do your homework well in the first place. If you were to do your homework well in the first place and focus on performance and scalability early on, the tool usage would tell you to either focus on Java or more infrastructure to handle high load or low read percentage scenarios. These are very reasonable and sensible outputs of the tool. What olio does not tell you is the set of tradeoffs which are outside its scope, impact of the various choices of languages and toolkits on spead of release, agility, robustness and maintainability – that is something that the startup architect will need to come to some decision independently.

Finally sun talked about its Startup Essentials Program which offered various promotional incentives to startups. Very useful incentives, though I would advise people to evaluate if usage of such incentives introduces a small degree of lockin onto open solaris (I like opensolaris – just would ensure that I would use it in a manner that doesn’t introduce too much lock in), and also the post production cost implications including support. There were a fair degree of questions through the session, and I think as an audience it makes sense to pause and take the matter offline if the proceedings continue to be stuck at a stage after two or three questions.

Update: A presentation similar to the one presented can be found on Olio site at Olio Presentation

In parting

All in all a very useful session, and a left me with the desire to attend more sessions subsequently. Thanks POCC and all the organisers.

About the Author – Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay is a Pune-based software Engineer with 17 years in the field. Passionate about software engineering, programming, design and architecture. For more info, check out his PuneTech wiki profile. He blogs about software engineering and programming languages at /var/log/mind, and other more general topics at /home/dhananjay.

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Techstart.in: Nurturing the passion of our engineering students

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This week on PuneTech, we are going to feature a bunch of initiatives started by people who are passionate about helping students in our engineering colleges (actually anybody interested in technology, student or not, engineering or not) to be more, achieve more, learn more, all with the help of mentors from industry who would like to see all these talented students reach their true potential. Watch this space over the next few days for more such initiatives or better yet, subscribe for updates via RSS, Email, or twitter. Today, we are featuring, Techstart.in. (Update: the next post in this series is about KQInfoTech’s industry-supported “free” PG Diploma in Systems Programming.)

Techstart.in is a group that aims to create special interest technology clubs of students, with each club mentored by one or more people from from industry who have experience in that area, and are willing to spend time with the students to guide them. The club will have loosely structured activites, projects to complete, possibly presentations and discussions, all planned and guided by the mentors.

The club was started by Freeman Murray and has since been joined by a number of mentors – but there is no such thing as too many mentors. So, you should seriously consider signing up. The only qualifications you need are that you should be passionate about this, and you should have a little industry experience.

Freeman explains techstart.in thus:

The basic idea is to find people with practical industry experience willing to spend some time each month creating or identifying useful exercises people interested in their field could do to develop their skills and posting them on a blog or mailing list. Additionally they spend time each week facilitating a discussion of the participants on a mailing list.

The intention is not to compete with existing online resources for technical training and support, but to provide some more human support and mentorship for people on the path. Mentors can and should encourage participants to engage in the existing online communities surrounding their technologies. Their guidance as to what communities to engage, and how to engage could still be invaluable.

In this way, over time people can develop significant skills in fields where they don’t have formal training while they continue their studies or working full time.

We all crib about the quality of technical education, but with the Internet we have the opportunity to do something about it. We can help eager young and the motivated who want to get into high-tech but are over whelmed at the amount of information available on the internet, or get blocked because of elementary problems.

It shouldn’t take much time, for mentors just a couple hours a month to research the monthly activities and post links to learning resources participants should look into, and then a couple hours each week responding to questions and facilitating discussion on the mailing list. For participants, activities should take 5 – 10 hours of effort each month, plus some additional time sharing with the community thru the blog and the mailing lists.

If there’s a field you are passionate about and feel more people should get into, please think about setting up a small club for it on the techstart wiki. If you see a club where people are exploring a technology you’ve been curious, by all means join the community.

The initial clubs we have are in blogging, advanced java and open source technology. Amit is also mentoring a group to write some automatic deployment scripts in php.

Find out more on the wiki – http://techstart.in

How to participte – Students

To participate in one of the techstart clubs simply visit the clubs website, or join the their mailing list. Make sure to introduce yourself to the community when you join, and read over any introductory material the mentor put up on the website or in the group.

How to participate – Mentors

Start your own club or make yourself available for mentoring people on a project – simply create a mailing list for it on Google Groups or any other public mailing list site, and add a description of it and yourself to this wiki. At least every month post exercises to the list which participants can do to strengthen their skills, and spend some time every week monitoring the list, encouraging discussion, and helping people with problems. That’s it !

Contact [mailto://freemanATpobox.com|Freeman] to get the wiki key. If you’d like to join the discussion about how to make TechStart better please join the TechStart Google Group

Clubs already formed

Title: Bloggers Club

Mentors: Freeman Murray Tarun Chandel

Description:

This track is for people interested in writing on the internet. All participants will set up and customize their blog initially, and then every two weeks participants are encouraged to share their next post with the group. The group will give feedback on the writers style, grammer and ideas. Members are additionally encouraged to comment on eachother’s blogs and do cross linking. Occasionally exersizes relating to google analytics and SEO will be given to the club members. Twitter, Videoblogging , Google Analytics, SEO, RSS and feedreaders will also be discussed in time.

Mailing List: groups.google.com/group/bloggers-club

Title: Java Insights 101

Mentor: Parag Shah

Description:

This learning track is for developers who have completed at least one course in Core Java (or are familiar with basic principles of Java, like syntax, compiling, and running Java programs) and would like to improve their understanding of the Java language and ecosystem.

URL: adaptivelearningsolutions.blogspot.com/2008/11/javainsights-101.html

Mailing List: groups.google.com/group/adaptive-learning

Title: Open Source Technology

Mentor: Tarun Dua

Description:

This is a track for technologists who want to build upon their understanding of the free and open ecosystem being provided by the Open Source and relatively open and portable datasets. Do you dig a well everytime you want to drink water, then why do you insist on hacking a new solution when another more efficient solution already exists as Open Source. Leverage what already exists in the ecosystem instead of re-inventing the wheel.

URL: linux-delhi.com

Mailing List:groups.google.com/group/linux-delhi-techstart

Title: Auomatic Deplyoment Script

Mentor: Amit Singh

Description:

Ami of this project is to automate the process of deploying websites written in PHP. A very basic script exists at my blog, we will be enhancing it by putting continuous integration, database migration etc.

URL:http://sourceforge.net/projects/adscript

Mailing List: http://groups.google.co.in/group/adscript

Mentors already signed up

Name Affiliation Skills & Interests
Freeman Murray upStart Software development training, startup culture, internet video, internet advocacy
Subhransu Behera EnTrip Ruby on Rails, Web Application Development, Linux System Programming, Fedora Packaging
Parag Shah Adaptive Software Solutions Software development, Software development training, New media technologies
Tarun Dua E2ENetworks Efficient technology operations is the key to effective delivery of technology where it matters most.
Amit Singh Pune It Labs Pvt. Ltd. Web Application Development
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