3rd semester classes started today. There was nothing special. In the evening, there were a discussion between Shyam and Mahesh on TASM, MASM and NASM. Though I don’t know anything about the topics, me and Sajjad from S3 CSE-B also stayed with them. I stayed in the college lab till 6.45PM for the Debian installation and reached home by 7.45PM.

I created a GDM theme for GNULabs @ MESCE, with the background picture of a field and hills. I also tried using a picture of college, but it looked very wired.

The strike continued today too. But, there were rumors that some from girl’s hostel attended the exams and they just wrote their name and roll no in the answer paper. Anyway, the majority didn’t attend the exam and are hoping for a retest. A few of us(more than 10) went for the film, “Annan Thambi”, of Mammooty, which was released yesterday. At Popular Paradise, Valanchery, we had to wait for about 2 hours for the film to start. The film was interesting and Mammooty is in double role.

The IPL Twenty20(T20) also starts today. The days coming are that of T20 cricket. Details of IPL T20 can be found at http://www.iplt20.com/.

Its strike again… Now its for taking back some students who were suspended for some enquiry reasons. No one was allowed to enter the college and we were all in the hostel near by, named “Cuba”. Its the first time, our exams were not cancelled(Hope so as none attended).

Though there were plans to go for a film, we abandoned it and went to the river side. There were more than 6 from our classs and we enjoyed walking through the sand. We also got range for DD News in Aalok’s China made phone…:-)

Today was the college sports day. Since the series exams are near, most have gone home and hence the participation was less. I went to the college to attend the mechanical workshop scheduled in the afternoon section, but I was disappointed to hear that there was no workshop today. Its not because of my fond for mechanical workshop; its because I am one section behind everyone, due to some leaves. So, I and Krishnaraj went to help Shyam and Mahesh to configure the systems for tomorrow’s workshop related to localization of softwares and its importance, organized by the GNU Lab @ MESCE. The workshop is conducted by Jinesh K, a former student of MESCE. The exact topic is “Opportunities and challenges of Localization/Internationalization in Personal Computing”. We installed Malayalam locales and some softwares related to Malayalam developed by SMC.

I have been wondering how to install Malayalam language in Debian and enabling the menus in Malayalam. Today, I came to know how to do it and much more regarding mounting drives, network drives, apt-get, Synaptic Package manager, .sh extension files, etc. The lab chosen for the workshop was the Multi-Core computing lab of IT department and most of the systems have Debian installed. Also, the staff in the lab helped us a lot by installing Debian in the systems which don’t have it and in mounting the drives and placing our files in server.

We were in the lab till around 8 O’ clock. Vishnu and Savanan from S1S2 CSE-B also came to help us.

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.