[Ilugc] Open Source Lab Syllabus
- From: yuvipanda@xxxxxxxxx (Yuvi Panda)
- Date: Fri Jun 18 20:27:54 2010
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 7:20 PM, Vatsala Dorairajan
<vatsala.dorairajan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sir, Let me assure you that your house is absolutely not at risk because a
PDF file mentions these. Colleges themselves make sure they have a 'few'
software - to ensure their inspection from their certifying authority goes
on well. One fine day I walked into my computer lab in my college to find
"Visual Tools Lab" and "Operating Systems Lab" boards setup on top of a row
of 8 computers per board.
I walked into the *same* lab, saw the same boards - and assumed that
Operating Systems Lab was where people hacked on Kernels and Drivers.
Turns out it was the corner where older computers are kept, mostly
used for ..... Nothing.
Ofcourse, Visual Tools Lab is extremely popular - all new machines
with internat access! Facebook is blocked, but Orkut is *not* - and
I'll let you figure out the reason why.
And there was one Red Hat Machine setup which was called Linux Server which
students were not allowed to touch as touch would disrupt the telnet
connections from other machines ?in the lab would get 'disconnected'. That
the LAN cable was in a bad shape dint matter.
I think the LAN Cables are now better off. The Red Hat card has been
replaced with a 'Windows VISTA Server, do not touch!' card. Two
powerful dual-xeon machines sleep mostly unused - the are usually used
as print servers and CD burners. Another one serves as the 'Anti Virus
Server'. I don't know where the Linux machine we all telnet into (we
are all 'user1' and our passwords are all '1234') is kept.
And I am also sure that a lot of staff members will be wondering how to
handle this "situation" - they will consider asking their friends (staff in
neighbouring colleges) to loan some programs for the trainee typists(i.e lab
students) to practice.
I planned to make things atleast slightly better - write those
programs myself (and have it reviewed by people with more
brains/experience) and hand it to the staff. Much better than letting
students copy the pos, buggy, really-badly-styled, and plain-ugly code
that they now have to use.
Couldn't help this rant. going by usual standards in the college i have
seen, this lab syllabus looks pretty ambitious and I pray that this does not
become another joke in the name of labwork as is usually the case.
Yes - I'm sure copying perl from 'observation' to 'observation' is
going to be a *lot* of fun!
--
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog
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