Open View

Yes folks! Open Solaris final version is going to get released this May 5th world wide at Sun's Head Office. This is a very special occasion for every open source enthusiast. People who are following it right from its DP releases are waiting for this moment. We at SASTRA love Open Solaris very much that we feel like it's our own child. We feel that a new baby is going to be born in our family on May 5. So we have planned to celebrate it in a big way by having a huge birthday party by cutting a cake and distributing sweets! Open Solaris is very special for every Corona ( that's how every GLOSS member is called :-)) and this occasion is even more special for us. May Open Solaris, be the best OS on the planet when it is born this May.
As for the celebration, we'll be doing it only on 6th as 6th in India is 5th in USA where it is born. I request all of you to have blast on May 5 for Open Solaris and also come and join me and my GLOSS team for own house OS :-)
I will post the photos of the celebration here in Open View and if possible I ll add some videos also.

The GLOSS discussion forum becoming more and more active everyday. It is directly reflected in our post counts. Last month mine was 18. This month it has crossed 60 already. We can see replies to the posts in gap of almost 2 mins. Its becoming like a chat room for the members of the group. I was worried that nearly all of these posts are nothing but flames or useless replies. But today, Venki posted a new thread introducing us to a new software named PicLens.

PicLens is a plugin for IE or Firefox. It is not just another plugin, but a software of its own kind. It gives you a 3d view of the pictures you search for. After installing the plugin, you restart your browser and this page loads up allowing you to go for the first drive.
Now press the play button on the image and your Vista transforms into an evolved version of Combiz-Fusion and you get to view the pictures in 3d. That too, not compromising on the speed of your machine. Trust me, I tried this on a 512mb machine and it was loading at the speed as if I was watching a video from my hard disk.


You can move from one end to another and zoom into any picture and it will loaded in real-time. The animations and speed in this part is too good. When you click on a zoomed image, the image is loaded in full screen mode with a film strip of the other images at the bottom.

This is when you click an image to zoom in
Now, a full screen for you. :-)

After the inital drive, I decided to try it with a Google Image search. So I searched for the pictures of Rajnikanth. The results showed up. When I moved my mouse over an image, the play button appeared. I clicked it and viola! the screen changed to the 3d view and I can see the the results of my search in the 3d wall. The best part is, it even displayed results from other pages as well on the wall.

You can download this plugin at

http://www.piclens.com/demo/#

Trust me, its too good. :-)

When a community grows, it is heard in its locality. When a part of it is in the Internet, it is heard worldwide. One of the primitive methods used to make it to be heard worldwide is to create groups of the community in popular sites like GOOGLE, Yahoo and Orkut. Some people even blog about it. As for GLOSS, we have the blog here in Sun's website.
The next thing people do is to create a Wiki page on it. This is exactly what I did today. Yes, you read it correctly, GLOSS is now in Wikipedia. Here is the URL to the blog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLOSS_at_SASTRA

Feel free to visit the page and contribute to it also.

PS: I forgot to tell this, the GLOSS page at Wiki doesn't have the logo on it. So, some one please be kind enough to upload the GLOSS logo to it.

Today we were discussing about the future of GLOSS. Eventually, we
decided to create a newsletter for GLOSS and circulate it in over 80
countries. The name of it is ' Open View '. That's right, it's the
same name as this blog.
So people, wait for a week and you can read the newsletter here.

--
Thanks and Regards,

Harish.R.

Don't ask for a light load, but rather ask for a strong back.

Let me tell you about GLOSS. GLOSS a community in my college established with the view of learning and contributing to open source technology. Our goal was to become the largest contributor in India. Over a period of time, GLOSS has evolved in the college to a great extent in creating awareness among students to learn open source technologies and has grown into a family rather than a community with everyone having a sense of belongingness in the group. GLOSS is supported by Sun Microsystems directly as of now.

We have taken up some projects in open source too. I ll write more about out projects and keep this blog updated with the latest happenings in GLOSS and also my views on some open source technologies.

Btw, this is the logo for GLOSS. I designed it. Pretty cool na? Everytime I look at it in the Sun website or on any notice or certificate , I feel very proud.