Recently few good folks from PEC, my college started an online forum at pecobians.com. I wanted to provide some feedback on this. When I started to write the feedback, I was thinking of sending it as a personal email to Lord PEC the admin of pecobians.com, but then I thought it would be a good idea to just put it over here and see what every one says. And maybe someone unrelated to PEC might find it useful. So here it is

———–
Dear Lord PEC

I have been meaning to write this email for a while. Now that it is weekend over here I can write it. First of all kudos for the great work done on pecobians.com. It is a noble effort and I have a lot of appreciation for the folks involved in this project. You might have noticed some noise over here

http://www.pnarula.com/archives/2005/02/12/some-news-about-the-alma/

You will be surprised to know how I came to know about pecobians.com. I have been toying with the idea of online community for PEC folks for a while. So I tossed an idea to Rahul Jindal aka Zombielabs and in reply he told me about pecobians.com. Here is some text from that email

==START EMAIL SNIP==

Now to the PEC project. What I am thinking is to club togather a bunch
of folks from PEC who have net access and ask them to blog about
Day-to-day-PEC. Idea came to me when I saw UCSD’s independent
student’s blog at

http://youcsd.com

Check this blog and you would know what I am talking about. The only
trouble is that they are in constant tussle with authorities, But then
that is the fun.

So what I ask from you is, that since you are my only contact in CHD,
even you are leaving now can we do something like this. Since CONTENT
will be created by students only so their involvement is must. For a
start it can be started by from $free$ blogspot. If a some good
content is being produced by students and good hits are there. I can
move it to its own domain and web space.

What say trooper..

== END EMAIL SNIP==

Having started with the online forums is a great start. This is like we have gathered a lot of people in a room and they are chatting with each other. I call forums the community piece of online web presence puzzle. Read here for more on this

http://www.pnarula.com/archives/2004/05/10/ccc/

Having established a vibrant community I think this would be good time to add another piece to it, some formal content in weblog manner. I guess on the same lines as I mentioned in the email for youcsd.com site. I have been doing similar things for a different community, you can see some of the work I have been involved at

Sarvagya - A wiki to capture knowledge about Hindi weblogs. Uses MediaWiki

Nirantar - Soon to be launched online magazine focused on Hindi blogging world. Uses CivicSpace

Akshargram - A group weblog for Hindi bloggers - Uses Wordpress

IMHO, take a look at CivicSpace. It has great features and is based on Drupal CMS. I chose it for one of my projects(Nirantar) after quite some research. And I see a lot of uses of its features in the Pecobians.com online community. You can see what is possible using this at the following URLs

Better Donkey
There is no Crisis
Flat Earth Award
Spread Firefox

Better Donkey is my personal favorite. Let me know if you need any help or ideas related to this.

–
Pankaj Narula
http://pnarula.com
http://hindi.pnarula.com/haanbhai

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I was smitten by Linux very early in my tech life. I still remember how long it took to configure X Windows on a CEL machine in the summer of 95. SAP also has a special initiative for linux It pleased me to read about German Railways migration to linux over here. What got me more interested was this snippet

The company has already shifted its vital train timetabling system from HP Non-Stop to Linux. Next, it will move various SAP systems, including sales support, from Unix to Linux. And by the end of the year, all remaining critical systems such as databases, application servers, Web servers, mail servers and network infrastructure will be running on Linux, the company said.

Definitely some thing to watch for. Someday I want to do a detailed ROI analysis of SAP on Linux.

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Rahul told me about this new hangout place for Pecobians at pecobians.com. I have always wanted some place like this and it was a great find. Immediately registered and posted the first post.

While surfing on this site, I also came across this video file showing a news item related to PEC on Star News. It was fun to watch and see old professors, present students on the screen. The news was quite special to me as I was also the part of placement cell as a representative of my class.

Read Hindi Version Here .

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In one of my lives, while I was still in college, I did a lot of work on GIS (ArcGIS and MapInfo) or geographical information systems. As a group we digitized the Chandigarh and applied a lot of GIS techniques for Income Tax department, one of the local elections etc. When I came to US in 1999 it amazed me to see the Yahoo Maps and Mapquest etc. But these maps were essentially static. Today I saw the newest kid in the maps and directions world - Google. My initial reaction was GOOD! Using the stateless HTTP they have made interactive maps. I was impressed to the point that I created a little flash movie of Google Maps testing. Here is what I tried on it

1. Find an address near San Jose Airport
2. Zoom out to see more of silicon valley.
3. Pan to move around in the valley.
4. Finally go back to the point where I started.

[FLASH] http://pnarula.com/media/video/google-maps.swf ,464, 358 [/FLASH]

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