Firefox 5th Anniversary Celebrations at Pantnagar

“Happy Birthday dear Firefox!!!”

Firefox lovers from College of Technology, Pantnagar gathered for the 5^th Anniversary Celebrations of world’s favourite browser – Firefox outside the old college building and sang these lines in the glory of Firefox! It was a fun filled celebration with lots of prizes and goodies for the well wishers of Firefox.

I was excited already seeing the quality of cake baked by the local shopkeeper and, for a change, was at the event venue a minute in advence, that is, at 3:59pm! I was shortly joined by Sumit Sati and very soon about 15 other enthusiasts joined the party. The young girls from first year (although they didn’t have a hunch what this Firefox was) had designed an excellent Firefox banner which was a piece of attraction throughout the celebrations. After the cake cutting and subsequent customary eating, everyone present shared their Firefox Experiences. The guys discussed how they got to know Firefox, what they liked in Firefox which made it better than ‘some other browsers’, and of course, their favourite add-ons! Video Download Helper, Echofon, Download Them All, Firebug and AdBlock Plus were the clear favourites of those present there.

Then was the time for some quizzing and goodies! Me and Sumit Sati put up a number of questions which the young guns of the college smartly answered to take away all what we had – Firefox wrist bands, stickers and lanyards (which we had carefully preserved from Mozilla Camp Delhi). Due to various competitive examinations and other factors, the attendance was quite low but it was lots of fun, all the same!

Pics and videos from the party.

Payback Time: Celebrating 5th Birth Anniversary of Firefox

Ever since the Tim Berners Lee gave us the world wide web, we have seen numerous technologies and innovations on this platform. For me, and i am sure for millions others, Mozilla Firefox is one of the best out of them. The web was sick of the monopolistic attitude of some bullying ‘explorers’ and deserved a change. This welcome change was brought about with the initiation of the Mozilla project which gave us this cute li’l baby called Firefox. Now this baby is 5 years young and is revolutionizing the experience of the web for the users every minute. I personally rediscovered the web using Firefox over IE.

My introduction to Firefox is an interesting story. It was the year 2006 and i was on my home PC, searching for some stuff or the other put in it by the computer salesperson from whom my father had bought it. Doing so, i stumbled upon a .exe setup of something called a Firefox! I instantly loved the name and installed it just for the sake of satisfying my curiosity. When it got installed (it was a 1.x version and it took only a few seconds in installation!), i found out that it was a web browser. At that time, i had a dial-up 33.6 kbps connection on which IE used to give me 1.0kbps to 1.5kbps of download ‘speed’. I tried downloading with Firefox and voila, on the same connection, it gave me speed of 3kbps! I was jubiliated and since that day, i have never used IE (except for cases when i don’t have any option ).

Mozilla celebrated the 5th birth anniversary of Firefox on 9th November, 2009. There have been several Firefox 5th Birth Anniversary celebrations around the world in the past week and two. So me, along with my batchmates and fellow members of Open Source User Group, Pantnagar are organising a party in our college to celebrate the 5th birth anniversary of Firefox! We would be having a small cake cutting ceremony followed by a quiz on Firefox. There are exciting prizes to be won! The details of the party are as under:
Date : Sunday, 22 November 2009

Time : 4:00 pm onwards

Venue: PCT Lawns
Everyone associated with the college (students, professors, workers, everyone) is cordially invited to be a part of this fun! It’s payback time for every one to whom Firefox has given so very much in the past 5 years.

Spread the word: http://3.ly/5p7

Spread Firefox: http://www.spreadfirefox.com

Firefox 5th Anniversary Celebrations

 

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at College of Technology, Pantnagar

It was August the 15^th all over again for the Open Source User Group (OSUG) / Sun Club / OSScamp Community, Pantnagar as Software Freedom Day was celebrated by the community in the college. The community organised an unconference for the interested students of the college. The event was planned on a short notice and hence adequate publicity could not be done but still a lot of more than 50 students attended and discussed Open Source inside out and upside down at the event. We managed to get permission from 2-5 in the evening which was certainly not enough considering the number of talks proposed by the students. Computer Engineering students from the II and III yrs of the college delivered numerous talks on a wide variety of topics.

The attendees after the SFD celebrations.

Some initial hitches were caused by some electricity issues but the time was utilised in some social sandboxing by the students. Students were peeked by the author (forgive me for that ) discussing technologies like Scala, Grails, Ogg, Svg, Netbeans, PHP……………………… and more (I’m sorry, I can recall only a few ). Once the systems were setup, it was time for us to go-go-go! The students enthusiastically demanded Vikash Pandey to begin his talk on Setting up a website, DNS and related issue. Vikash explained the minor details of setting up a website on a local Apahe server which were well grasped by the students. Once he finished, Nishant Singhal and Varun Agarwal were up front explaining the technical know-hows of System and Network Security. Sumit Sati initiated an interesting discussion during the talk: Ethical Hacking – does it really exist?! The bad weather outside was causing power cuts quite frequently so live demos related to System and Network Security were postponed for later. Meanwhile, Vigya Sharma came up with his lucid discussion on PHP, appropriately titled Introduction to PHP. It was basically a doubt clearing session regarding installation issues in LAMP and XAMPP and some bit of coding in PHP. The numerous questions raised by the students were handled well by Vigya. Following this server side scripting, was some Shell Scripting by Ankush Chander and Akshat Pokhriyal. The young lads started with “Why Unix?” and moved on with their talk explaining the powers of the shell.

Nishant and Varun facing volleys of questions during demonstration of System and Network Security.

We were running short of time and still had 6-7 more talks on queue! Going by the community vote, Aduait Pokhriyal was tossed up on the stage for an Introduction to Routing Protocols. After his talk, Nishant and Varun were ready with the demonstration of System and Network Security. They introduced the students to utilities like Netcat.

The clock had already ticked past 5 but we still had many openSolaris and Netbeans DVDs from Sun Microsystems to give away. Then Tanay Mathpal and Sumit Sati came up with an interesting way to do so; through an Open Source quiz! Simple Open Source trivia questions were answered by the students to take away everything we had in store for them!

The community then discussed the prospects of organising yet another OSScamp Pantnagar either in the campus of the university or in Nainital. The name OSScamp Nainital was exiting enough and the level of enthusiasm shown by the students showed that very soon the OSScamp Pantnagar community will take its first steps in this direction.

More pics from the event at Flickr.