There was a meeting during noon in our college to discuss about the future activities of GNU Lab at MES CE. It could be considered as the first official one. Raju sir, Raghesh sir and a few students including Shyam and Mahesh were present. The participation in the meeting was less as the study leave for university exams for second and third years starts today.

The current active topics were discussed and Raju sir suggested to go through the previous years Google Summer of Code topics to get more for the GNU Lab. Other suggestion were to have the college labs open 24 hours and to provide the root password for students, so that they could do much more. Raju sir himself supported us by quoting IIT’s and NIT as examples and said that the authorities here are not much encouraging and the college could develop in these aspects only with their help. He also suggested few ideas to overcome such situations. I am a bit disappointed too, that the conclusion of the meeting was to give first years works like to introduce or work with a particular software or topic. I think there might be talented ones who could do much beyond that and the selection criteria should not be based on year or semester wise.

Today, I went to the college just to attend the meeting of GNU lab. Mails were sent to the groups inviting all to participate. At first, the time was fixed as 10AM, but later shifted to 3PM. I was eager to see all who are there in the GNU Lab at the initial stage, but disappointed on seeing only Mahesh and Fahad there. We three went to the shore of Nila to discuss about the activities. Thus, we had our first meeting of GNU Lab in the shore of Nila, sitting in the sand. There wasn’t much to discuss and we just made a rough idea of what has to be done. Priority was given to the GNU Lab Website and a college based Debian distro, which includes all that a college student need and surely Compiz and good themes to amaze all. We also decided to conduct a meeting every 2 weeks, even though we doubt about the participation. The meeting lasted for only an hour and we all returned home.

Today was the closing of college for Christmas holidays. There were rumors that classes will be let off at noon, but classes continued up to 3.30PM. The last two periods were spend by singing songs and by anthaksharis, with the permission from the teachers. It was really fun and can be called as “College Days”.

The MES-FSF group had a meeting today at 1PM to discuss about the activities and topics for exhibition. As usual, there were small clashes with ideas. It was almost fixed to conduct the exhibition on 11th January 2008 and we all have to submit the report for it during our next meeting on 31st this month. A few new students from S4 EC too joined us and now we are a good team of about 20 members. I also heard a good news that discussions are going on to setup a Debian repository in MES.

I also bought the GPRS recharge card today as my mother gave me the permission [but not the money 🙁 ]. Now waiting for it to be active.

Today S1S2 CSE batch jointly had planned to have a Christmas and Eid celebration at 12.45PM. We have invited all our teachers and other staffs from the CSE department. Due to the function by MATRICS, we are advised to stop our function by 1PM. Being our first function and due to the lack of time, we couldn’t work it out better as we thought. Head of CSE Department Anil sir introduced all the teachers to us. Later we presented Anzab sir, who took Basic Electrical for us with a momentum as he was leaving the college.

The function of MATRICS(MES Association for Technical Research In Computer Science), the association of CSE department in MES started by about 2PM. There were speeches by Principal, Vice Principal, Head of the department and the former Head of the department. The first ever magazine by MATRICS, “THE TECHNIK” was also inaugurated. There was a flash presentation about the contents of the magazine too.

In the last, we had an interactive session on one of my favorite topic “Free Software” with the technical team from focuz Infotech, Kochi led by Hiran Venugopal. It was really informative and helped to clear few of my doubts.

Today, there was a discussion about the topics for the Free Software workshop in the #mes-fsf IRC channel at freenode.net. Shyam, Priyan, Shehin, Vibin Das, Sachin and Krishnaraj were present there. We decided to conduct the workshop on 11th December, Tuesday and planned for a meeting on 3rd December, Monday to have a final discussion about the topics. Currently, there are 13 members to present the topics and about 10 topics, out of which most are related to electronics side. Anyway, with the workshop, we hope we will have a voice to ask for a GNU lab at MES.