Bye to Blogger

Now it is time to bid adieu to Blogger. I have switched from blogger to wordpress. Blogger has remained the same for almost two years and there has not been any change or innovation. Wordpress looks like a cool choice to me. Wordpress has a lot of features when compared to blogger. One more reason is restriction of blogger in college . Anyway i am switching over to wordpress and my wordpress blog is http://senthilkumaran.wordpress.com .

High Adrenaline Action

My 50th post is going to be something about me and snakes. May prove to be a interesting story also. Since it is sunday i was off for a casual walk near my home with my pet Tommy. About 100 feet from my home i sited a snake about 6 feet long and considerably large in diameter waiting to catch a frog that was in front of it. I did not notice it at first but on seeing me it went inside a large bush near that. A snake that has caught my attention has never managed to live more than 10 minutes. The count of snakes killed by me is already in double digit and i thought of adding one more to it. So i spent the next 10 minutes beating the bush with the intent of bringing the snake out. The bush was a little large to search and there was no sign of the snake but i was sure that it was still there. After about 30 minutes i went to the same spot with a little large and of course with my pet.

Still the frog was there in the same position where i saw it first. I started the same old job, beating the bush with the hope of getting the snake out. At one point i found the snake moving inside the bush and whacked it with my stick. One more blow after that i started hearing hissing sounds. The sounds became strong and i realised the breed of snake. Ofcourse it was KING COBRA. It was there with its body raised to about 2feet and it has streched its hood and is making strong hissing sounds. The hood and hissing sound did wat it was supposed to do. I dont know where half of my courage went once i saw that snake. (summa saadha pambuntu nenachein, anna naaga pambuntu yaaruku theriyum)

An awesome and fearful sight it was. I backed off but my pet kept advancing and started barking. It was just 1 to 2 feet away. I thought it is going to be the last evening for my pet. Somehow managed to collect him and returned home. After tat still went there this time armed with some bricks and stones, still alone. I stayed a little away and threw some stones. But i could not find anything. So i returned home.

Encounters with snake is not something new to me. I started killing snakes right from my 4th standard and had killed all sorts of snakes. I remember killing a snake when i was 11 by stamping with my shoes. But this is the first encounter with cobra and this is the first time i have seen a snake standing against its opponent and this is the first time i felt some fear for a snake. Legends say that if you beat a cobra and dont kill, it remembers and take revenge on you even after years. Lets see. Already this incident has become a hot news for my nieghbours. I am hearing all sorts of stories now. Ok enough of the COBRA story i have CORBA exam tomorrow to study.

Drupal Again

Yesterday a website was created and launched in just two to three hours. Thanks to Drupal. Drupal is really making our work a lot easier. The first time we worked in Drupal was when we redesigned the college website, now it is the glugot site. We had been thinking about moving the glugot site running in mediawiki to some other CMS for a very long time. Yesterday we decided to work on the site and decided on Drupal to finish the Job. Within three hours the work was completed and the site is up and running. We have turned into very fast workers indeed :). Now the site is perfect and looks great. Still there are a lot more modules to be added in Drupal and the contents in website should also be modified. Click here to take a loot at the new website.

Testing Dapper Drake

Got a feel of Dapper drake atlast. Waited for the oppurtunity to test Dapper Drake for a long time after it was released. I could not get it installed in my system as the live CD was not running in my 128MB ram. The oppurtunity to try out Dapper Drake came in the form of my friend vanniaperumal. On saturday we went to his home to install Debian, but the same old problem of debian installer and SATA harddisk spoiled it all. So it was time to test try out the new version of Ubuntu.

The installation proceeded smoothly and there were just 6 easy steps to be done by the user after which the installer does all stuff while we sit back and relax. The GUI or GNOME looks good. But all the efforts seemed to be a waste when we were not able to find EMACS or gcc installed. This is my first experience with Ubuntu Dapper Drake. The next step would be to enable XGL and to test it. Heard that XGL rocks so eager to look how it looks. Though Drape drake looks good, has a good GUI and lot many features it is Debian that rocks. Waiting for the official release of Debian etch on December.

A Tech Feast

Opensolaris day was conducted in college on Aug 18th. It was a technical feast to any programmer with a little unix background. Two great minds of SUN Microsystems Mr.Ananth Shrinivas and Mr.Pratap Devarajan were the speakers. They introduced a plethora of tools available in Solaris that would make the life of unix programmer easy. It was amazing to hear about bleeding edge technologies like Dtrace, ZFS, Zones and SMF etc. I also had a feel of Solaris after it was installed in a system in lab. The desktop is the same old GNOME with some customizations but the commands seem to differ a bit from GNU/Linux.

Dtrace was amazing and how the results were interpreted was little more amazing. Both the speakers had unique way of interpreting the bits and addresses thrown out by Dtrace. Zones & ZFS was interesting and are technologies for the future. Pratap who was one of the creators of Belenix also talked about the problems he encountered and the steps in creation of Belenix livecd. There were also instances where GNU/Linux was belittled while comparing it with Solaris. For guys like me who have great passion for GNU/Linux those facts were hard to digest. Except for that it was a great meeting with a lot of mind boggling stuff and introduced us to some great technologies. The opensolaris community has born in our madurai with the creation of Opensolaris user group called MOSUG which is an acronym of Madurai open solaris user group.

Something Something Unakum Enakum - Has Something in it

A lot of hype by my friends led me to the doors of Jeyam theatre to watch SSUE. As usual the cost of the ticket was increased due to the good name the movie managed to gain. Something Something had something to watch in the first half and nothing in the second half. But it had attracted a lot of family crowd and may interest some if it is the first time.

Ravi has done his part well under his brother direction. Santhanam has managed to evoke some laughter from the crowd. It seems that Trisha has realised that it is important for an actress to show some actions and reactions and has tried hard to produce some also looks a little beautiful when compared to other movies. The film had a light doze of comedy throughout. The songs in the first half are gr8. Prabhu is serious throughtout the movie and shows a lot of emotions. Bhagyaraj impresses but does not have a great role to play. Richaa, Manivannan, kalabavan mani just come and go and do nothing.

But it was the sentiments that irritates at lot. Hero risking his life for a toy horse, hero eating rice mixed with chili powder, hero sleeping in the dung den etc etc irritates us a lot. Slightly over doze of sentiments and emotions. SSUE seems to be a film that can be seen together with the family. I could see a lot of crowd getting too involved with the movie and one guy was shouting something like "Oh god the villain has arrived". It may turn out to be a hit for Jeyam ravi.

Removing "Edit Primary Link" in Drupal

Renovation of our college website gave me an oppurtuity to work in Drupal. Did a lot of tweaking and little editing in CSS and just got the feel of Drupal. Drupal rocks with a plethora of features, plugins and modules. It was a great experience to work in a cool CMS like Drupal. One thing in which we got stuck up with was removing "Edit primary links" thing that appeared in all pages. So here comes some of my experience which may help some

1) To remove the "Edit primary links" u have to edit menu.inc files in the include directory. In Drupal 4.7.2 u have to comment lines 814 to 817. The lines could be easily identified.

2) To upload image in a page image module and img_assist modules available in Drupal is used. Drupal image icon can also be added to the Tinymce WYSIWYG editor for easy use. But even after doing all this image may not upload correctly. The problem may be because of the webserver. Apache2 should be configured with --enable-gd-imgstrttf --enable-gd-native-ttf for them to work correctly.

Fascinating FLOSS

I was just searching the various FLOSS softwares that are available for Windoze as a part of preparation for SFD 2006. It was surprising to see the abundance of free softwares for windoze platform. What is more interesting is that they have great functionalities when compared to the original proprietary ones. Free softwares like Emacs, Gaim, GIMP, Blender, Openoffice, Notepad2, NVU, Apache, Inkscape, PHP Triad and of course the gr8 gr8 firefox have started replacing the proprietary tools. There are also a very good and interesting games available like cube, mario,super tux, sudoku and sokoban. I have replaced my windoze environment fully with the FLOSS software and whatever little work i do in M$ OS is done using FLOSS softwares. It is gr8 to enjoy a lot of freedom and work on good, cool, gr8 softwares when compared to the proprietary ACME products.

A dream comes true

A great moment to cherish and to remember in life. Got a job offer from the fortune 11 company whose name was decided based on a toss of coin. This week has been quite busy due to the unfortunate selection for the interview process in the well company. Fortunately or unfortunately i got rejected and got the oppurtunity to attend HP. By god's grace i was one among the 25 who cleared AT out of 287 who attended it. After that all went fine in the technical interview. The HR interview was a bit difficult but all ended fine and by god's grace | miracle | ability | luck i got an offer from the global gaint but the wait for the result was something unbearable. Looking forward to the joining date. So what next, sit back and relax.

Breaking the code

Atlast i found time to see "DaVinci Code" a good movie which raised a lot of controversy in the recent days. It was not released here but there are a lot more ways of doing things. After seeing the movie i got a little interested in cryptanalysis. The "Network Security" classes in college increased the enthu. So i thought of representing my view about the movie in the form of cipher text. So if u are interested in Ciphers, go ahead decipher the simple and stupid cipher and let me know what u have found out. If not leave it as some stupid crap. So here comes the cipher

NOWUK PIXJW JNPCP XGCFI AKXCZ PLQKO PAEWD KADGJ WJHKW APPPE AOIOA
KBEHK

Hint: It involves two steps with two standard encryption algorithms. In the first step remember the numbers 3,4,5. If deciphered it gives a meaningless text. The text can further be deciphered using the following example. If 'ATWILHA' represents the word "EXAMPLE" what would the resulting text represent. With these hints it would just take seconds to solve. Let me see who solves it. This is my first try with ciphers so i do not know about the quality of question.