Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

Tales from Softec, Lahore

I've just returned from another software competition in Lahore. I highly regard Softec, however this year, I would say that it was close to a disaster.

First, the food: Last year participants were offered 3 meals a day, break fast, meal and dinner, however this time around, the first day it went well, however the second day they did not offer any meal, and participants were left to fend for themselves. I also heard that the accommodation which was provided to participants was below standard and even the police broke into it during 2am in the night to check up something, and participants had to be shifted to some other facility.

Second about the judges for the software competition: They were the most pathetic and rude lot I've ever seen in any competitions. I've never witnessed a judge telling a participant that I'm not interested in your project so I'll not evaluate you, this was common place in Softec 2007. All judgments were purely ad-hoc, some projects got as many as 6-7 evaluations (we got 6), while others just got 1. Some projects like SIGMa, which was presented by my friend,a judge was sent to evaluate, he flatly said I'm not interested in your project so I won't evaluate you.

The judges we got were disappointing, the judge who came to us on the second round, did not know that running programs are represented in the form of pages in memory, and by transferring all the pages of a program you transfer the address space of the process. He found this difficult to understand as he had no concepts about paging in Operating systems. Paging was not part of my project, rather Grid enabling application was, hence in process migration I made a passing mention of it, and thats were the judge got stuck and spent some 30 minutes in this basic theory, at the end he got tired and left, without listening to the entire project.

Except 1-2 judges of all the 6 which came to us, none of them knew about CERN, the largest particle physics lab in the World, and the birthplace of the WWW.

The main issue as I see it was that most judges were from the local industry, the local industry is still in its infancy. People who are employed in these industries mostly came there by just having learnt some Microsoft technologies like .NET or VC++, so have no indepth knowledge about systems such as Operating systems. ProCom featured some of the best judges I've come across, some of them were from IBM. The reason we won there was that both judges and us, spoke the same language, this was not the case in Nascon or Softec, where the judges were either FAST faculty members (Nascon), or local industry professionals (Softec) and were low on indepth knowledge about systems. Additionally cause ours was a research project on Grid computing, in Pakistan there is no requirement for Grids as massive processing is not carried out here, so people just do not know about it and thus are in a poor position to evaluate a project in this domain.

However Softec, still had a happy ending, another project from my university, the National University of Sciences and Technology (nust), won 1st prize! It is an IP-geolocation software. This means that NUST has won ALL major software competitions this year, which include Nascon (1st and 3rd prize to NUST), ProCom (1st prize to NUST), and Softec (1st prize to NUST), still one major competition remains, that is SoftCom held by the GIK Institute. However I would not be able to attend it as I will be in CERN, Faran, who wrote the IP geolocation software might be unavailable aswell.