Old is Gold

The incident I am going to tell you took place two days ago on 21st March while we were implementing our interfacing project during the midterm vacation. On that day when we went out to take lunch we saw piles of old monitors, CPUs, printers and other instruments were stacked on the corridor in front of the networking lab. Our lab administrator of MCL lab was there so we asked him about what was going on. And then he told us that to clean up spaces these old pcs are sent to BUET stock room from where they will be sold out. He also showed us the very firsts of some of our lab's PCs, printers which includes First PC with keyboard and tape memory, first bubble jet and laser printer, scanner , projector, a keyboard prototype designed by one of former student and CPU of every generation . We then thought that these things should be saved and displaying them would encourage young students about how technologies are evolving. So we talked to Mostofa Ali Patowari sir, Tanvir parvez sir , Abu wasif sir and Masud Hasan sir and told them our plans. All of them agreed and talked with our head of department, Masroor Ali sir who happily agreed and allow us to select some of those so that we could implement our plans. Now what we thought is that we could place them in open spaces like in different corners of our lab or classrooms, or in a suitable position in the corridor with leminated descriptions of the device. I didn't have camera with me then but I took some pictures with my mobile. So I am attaching them at the end of this post. Sorry for the poor resolution.
Finally along this post by "We" I meant Atif, Ashish, Ovi, Shahan and Shafi.



Click the thumbnails to have bigger and better view.

Peeking into Google

Urs Hoelzle, Google vice president of operations and vice president of engineering, offered a rare behind-the-scenes tour of Google's architecture on Wednesday. Read about how google works here.

Open Source Network

On 8th March, in the BUET DEL CAFE a meeting was held on open source network in Bangladesh, its usage and future. Munir Hasan (National Project Coordinator, Strengthening the ICT Capacity of the Prime Minister’s Office) lead the meeting And some officials of www.ankurbangla.org were present in that meeting. The main focus was on the bangla linux movements. The ankur officials told the story of their success and lack of supports, feedbacks and unwillingness of Bangladeshi people for using the open sourced operating system, linux. They also mentioned about latest goggle’s bangla version. Google just give us a translation but still it is not localized for Bengali people, as it does not focus Bengali culture. So, we have to make some moves to localize the open source network in Bengali. They also welcome us in the world of open source network by giving us some live cds and open offices of linux. Munir Hasan also told us about some target, s we can make the mozilla firefox in Bengali, and a total operating system in Bengali by 16th December of current year! But the main problem is short of participants, so, some of us will lively join the project.

A committee has formed from BUET students to operate the open source network activities in BUET. We will meet our present department of head, Dr. Muhammad Masroor Ali. We are going to approach for a complete linux based OS and network in BUET LABS. We also are going to arrange some weekly or periodically meetings or training for BUET students who are interested and if possible some more seminars on open source with the presence of leading personalities. A yahoogroup for the open source network in BUET has also formed BUET_OSN.

So, we are on move from BUET in the campaign of Open Source Network.

Return of the CS jobs

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that, five years after the dot-com bubble burst, high skill job market is increasing in Silicon Valley. I won't go into details, but here is an interesting paragraph from the article. Look where I bolded the numbers!!

"A study last month by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a nonprofit group representing businesses and government agencies in the area, found the nation's tech capital had a net increase in jobs in 2005 for the first time in four years. Most of the growth came in the category of creative and innovation services, including firms in research and development, scientific and technical consulting and industrial design. In total, the number of Silicon Valley jobs in these areas grew 4% from 2002 to 2005, reaching 72,734. At the same time, the number of jobs in electronic-component manufacturing -- which tend to involve assembly and other repetitive tasks -- dropped 28% to 23,772, while jobs in semiconductor-equipment manufacturing fell 23% to 58,133."

Intersting indeed. So much for the "EEE is the best" myth perpetuating in Bangladesh. I told some of my colleagues and classmates here about that, and we had a hearty laugh. My office mate from India told me that in India, CS is the most coveted subject in the IITs.

Anyway, this should be a bright light of hope shining in the horizon for the current students.