Hello World

With nearly two-thirds of a semester over, I hadn't coded a single Internet Programming Lab Exercise in the Lab. I had to code everything at home/hostel. The reason: our 'powerful servers' from Sun Microsystems in the Java Technology Lab, could not take the load of 33 simultaneous users. The machines were thin clients and so we would all be logging into one of the two servers and in effect would be sharing the resources of that server. The computers would freeze quite often and restart automatically (built in mechanisms?). And all this, while we still used a text-editor and a stripped down version of the desktop. I wonder if anyone in the industry uses a plain text editor to code in Java, given its array of API functions. Use the internet, for reference, you say! Well, two people on two different terminals cannot access the same site at the same time. Our infamous proxy server would say "simultaneous connections detected". So even the best of students' efforts to actually code their own programs in the lab would be crushed and spirits would be dampened every lab ;-) The irony - computers at the JAVA Technology Lab crash when we run Java programs on them. I guess the systems are just not powerful enough to take the kind of programs we students design! Is it that the systems need an overhaul, or are they configured incorrectly, no one knows. Too bad Sun Microsystems, now we have a bad image of your computers and of the Solaris OS.

And then it happened. We spoke to the HOD, and she graciously let us use the new Open Source Lab! The computers are blazing fast, and I wrote my first program in college today. "Hello IP Lab!". And we have netbeans for an editor. Yipee!

A big THANK YOU to the HOD and other staff who facilitated the change of lab process.

P.S.: As you can see from this post, we want this blog to be a medium for expressing students' opinions about college happenings, and not just a place where we carp about every little thing. Currently, there exists NO MEDIUM like this in college. No, class committee meetings don't seem to serve their purpose.