Harry Potter : Is Snape a Hero

Once i finished reading the six books of Harry Potter, i was eager to know about the latest developments in the Potter arena. I was searching for details about the seventh book and my friend Praveen showed me an article about Harry Potter. I think he found the article in a site called davekopel.com. I don't remember the exact link but a little googling will take to the essay. It can be taken as some sort of report and it contains some predictions based on the details given in the six books which may be overlooked in normal reading. I think the title is "Is Snape the unlikely hero of Harry Potter 7".The details given in the article are amazing and are sure to be overlooked by a normal reader. The essay predicts that Snape is still loyal to Dumbledore and may come back to kill the Darklord in the final book. It also predicts that harry may be the final Horcrux and he may be the heir of Godric Gryffindor. These predictions are supported with a number of points from the book. There are a lot more predictions and explanations. It may be interesting for harry's fans who are yet to read the essay.I also came across a series of comments by a number of harry potter fans about the story and about Snape in the archives of volokh.com. There were a number of predictions about the fake Horcrux of the sixth book and about R.A.B. It was interesting to see ideas and predictions of different people.

Ganguly's Exclusion

I was shocked to see Ganguly being dropped from the final test against Srilanka in Ahmedabad despite his reasonably good performance in the Delhi test. Ganguly's contributions to the team should not be underestimated. He is the one who resurrected the team when it was weak and formed the team India. Ganguly deserved better treatment and this is not the way to send off a national hero. It was under his captaincy India won matches, gained confidence and it was under his captaincy younger players like Yuvraj and Kaif were given oppurtunities and were recogonised. Every cricketer has ups and downs in his career and i strongly feel that Ganguly is regaining his touch with the willow. Senior players like Ganguly are assets to the team and they should not be excluded just like that.Hope Ganguly gets another chance to contribute to Indian team.

Aaru

Yesterday i went to the movie Aaru with a lot of expectation, and returned back with a headache. Praveen, Sriram, Subramani, Senthil Kumaran senior, his friend and myself went to Manicka Vinayagar theatre in Madurai for the evening show of Aaru. First we were entangled in the traffic near Palanganatham but the eagerness kept us moving and we walked the whole way from Paikara to Palanganatham. We reached the theatre by around 5:50pm and we got the ticket easily as there was not much crowd. We settled down in the theatre around 6:00pm and waited till around 7:00 for the show to start. There was nothing in the movie in the first half. The songs were good and they came at position when one would not expect the song to come. Vadivelu comedy didnot provoke any laughter. Trisha had a very little part to play except for the song and the chasing scene. The second half was little interesting but the whole movie itself is predictable and was not much intresting . Surya as usual has done justice to his role.Though there are 6 villians in the movie, except Kalabavan Mani all others fail to impress. I felt like this after watching the movie but there are some guys who said they enjoyed the movie.

Nerd's Test Score

Stupidity Test Score

Harry in Pogo

Pogo's list of films for diwali has added delight to my diwali celebrations. Pogo is telecasting films under the name "diwali jadoo mantar" starting from oct 27 to Nov 1. Pogo has started with "Baby's Day Out" on oct 27 and is continuing with "Home Alone", "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", "Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets" and ends with "Richie Rich" on Oct 31.

Being a great fan of the boy wizard i was particularly interested in the Harry Potter movies. I have already seen the three Harry Potter movies two to three times. Still i wanted to see the first movie today and i enjoyed it. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", the fourth film is set for a grand release on Nov 18 in our country when i am in the middle of my semester exams. The book was awesome with the storyline moving on with the triwizard championship filled with suspense till the end. The trailors of the fourth movie looks good and i can't wait to see how the various events of the triwizard tournament have been depicted in the film. I am sure about seeing the movie but i have'nt decided about the date and time. As of now i have started reading the fifth book "Harry Potter and the order of Phoenix" and as usual it is mesmerising like the previous books.

Heavy Downpour in Madurai

Good to see heavy rain in Madurai after quite a long time. Today it has been raining from evening 7.00 and slight drizzling continued till 12 and it kept me waiting in Mattuthavani Busstand for around one hour from 7:30 to 8:30. It has been raining hard in Madurai for the past two weeks and today it was little high when compared to the other days. Already the kalvai(canal) near my house has started to overflow and water has started entering our area. Now our area looks like venice with houses surrounded fully by water. Almost all parts of Tamilnadu has received good rainfall and Mettur dam is already overflowing and most of the low lying villages of cauvery delta areashave been inundated. Last year Mettur dam was empty owing to lack of rain during monsoon season and this year it has reached its maximum limit within two weeks of rain. Last year the farmers were affected because of lack of rain and were fighting for release of water from Mettur and this year Mettur is full and water is going to the sea without any use. After some years Tamilnadu has received heavy rainfall and it has resulted in floods in many parts probably due to the lack of proper plan. Something needs to be done about this.

GNUGet Website Modified

Atlast i modified the GNUGet website on last weekend. I had been thinking about changing the website design for many months and i did it in the last weekend. I started it on saturday morning and i did it slowly starting with the design of the header picture for the website using GIMP. After sometime i was engaged in HomeAlone-3 in HBO and qualifying race of the final grand prix of the year - the chinese grand prix. After spending 2 - 3 hours on TV i started the website work again and it continued for the next day. So on sunday i finished the work with taking screenshotsof GNUGet for the screenshots page and finally uploaded the pages on Geocities on sunday night. The link is www.gnuget.tk. Check out the link and send feedbacks about the software and the website.

Local Channels Again

It may be a happy moment for many in madurai. The local channels have started their service again. On tuesday when i switched on the TV i was happy to see Media Television (looks like the old Madura TV). Then i spent about 30 minutes searching for the other channels. Soon i found Krishna and Vaigai. The local channels stopped their service around july 2003 when i was waiting to join my college. After two years they have started it again and now i can enjoy watching new songs, new films and good action hollywood movies. Except for the advertisements which run for around 15minutes everything is good. What is so good about the local channels is, there are no serials and they donot talk for 15 minutes before a song. Previosly there were around six or seven local channels like MCC, AMN etc. Now there only three channels. As of now they seem to have a very small collection of songs and the same songs keep repeating again and again and there are no movies. Waiting for other channels also. Hope they start it soon.

Night lab in college

Yesterday we had night lab in our college. It went well and i enjoyed a lot in the company of Subramani, Musi, Sen, Sara and vasanth. After the DAA seminar i returned to the lab at around 6:30pm and i am still in the lab and Now the time is 2:30 in the morning. We had a lot of fun here with the prefinal years(us) teasing the seniors and the seniors teasing us in turn. Probably sara was the most affected person. He left the lab like a guy running away from Tsunami and the Tsunami, i mean the reason was us. We teased him like anything and we were rolling on the floor laughing ==)) seeing the way he was trying to escape . Hope Sara did not get offended by the silly comments.

And after some time each of us proceeded with our work. The seniors were doing something related to their project. Subramani and myself were studying about PVM and were trying to correct a matrix multiplication program written using PVM. It took a lot of time and finally we found the solution to the problem at around 5:00am in the morning. Other guys were burning CD's for souvenir. Atlast we left the lab at 6:00am in the morning. It was a pleasant experience to spend whole night in the college along with other guys and seniors.

DAA seminar

Today we had the DAA seminar by Mr.Pandurangan. He gave an intersting talk on basics of algorithms. As it was the first session he gave just introduction about the algorithms like why one should study algorithm and the need for various algorithms. His speech was very interesting and it created a liking towards the algorithm. He taught us about the various paradigms of algorithm like pruning. Tommorow we have two sessions, first from 9.00am to 12.00am and the second session from 2.00pm to 5.00pm. Hope it goes well .

PVM tutorial link

This link contains tutorials about PVM starting from the Installation, configuration and setting up of PVM cluster and about the various methods used for programming in PVM along with their syntax.The html version of the tutorial is available at

www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/pvm-book.html

and the postscript version of the book is available at

www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/pvm-book.ps

Coder's Congregation

Coder's Congregation the online programming contest conducted as a part of our department symposium today was a great success. we had a good response to Coder's Congregation. The total number of participants reached 29 greatest in the past two years after online programming contest has been launched. We also had contestants from companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Trilogy. The event started sharply at 11am in the morning. Once the contest started the contestants were very fast and we got the first upload in just 10minutes. It was awesome to watch the status page getting changed so fast with uploads reaching us every few minutes. Sen was in online in trichy and we had Sriram here for online clarification of doubts about the programs. In the middle we encountered a problem with the status page but it was solved soon and the contest continued peacefully. We felt more elated on seeing the feedbacks. Most of them had appreciated about the way the event proceeded without interruption and about the questions. Some had given some valuable suggestions. Overall the event went well and we are happy about it.

First Seminar in College

I took my first seminar in college two weeks back in Java . I had relatively large topic to cover and it was fully on "The collectionframework" in Java. It lasted for around 2 hours. In the first hour i covered theCollection Interfaces and the Collection Classes and in the next hour which was on the next day i covered Maps. This seminar needs special mention as it is my first seminar after joining the college. After the seminar in Java, on Sep 16th i took a seminar in compiler design. It lasted for around twenty minutes. I didnot prepare fully so i wasnot able to teach in the way i wanted. Though these seminars make us study even before the internals, seminars like these help us in overcoming stage fear and improve ourpresentation skill.

FStival 05

FStival 05, the software freedom day was celebrated in our college on September 10th. It was a organised by GLUGOT and GlugMadurai. It was a good experience for us. The chief guest was Dr.M.Murali from AUKBC chennai. He gave a small and interesting talk about the philosophies and the ideologies of Free Software and OpenSource. It was good to meet our seniors Mr.Amalon Joe Steeve and Mr.Balamurugan. Joe has changed his hair style and Bams (balamurugan) had doubled in size after going to Bangalore. I gave the welcome address and in doing i so i gave PHD to joe by welcoming him as Dr.Amalon Joe Steeve. Praveen handled the MOC, Sen talked about the Glugot activities and Musi (muthusivam) gave the vote of thanks. We had a good support from our second years. They handled most of the stalls and we third years took GTK Glade and LAMP. Karthick Balaji from REC and Venkat of IT took GIMP and Shell Script. Altogether the Stalls was good. I felt more convinced when i finished my stall that is GTK Glade. But what still irks me is the crowd that turned up on that day. The total number of students from our college was very less. I still wonder why dont they turnout in large members. The meetings are also arranged for them but still they dont respond to it. That needs to be discussed.

After the software freedom day celebrations it was time for partying. First stop was at annan kadai in college with Bams sponsoring the little treat. Each one had a double Omlette and a slice while Joe was at ATM preparing f0r the next treat in Hotel Park in Palanganatham. As Bams was going to Dharmapuri he didnot come to next treat. So we went to park by 6:30 pm discussing a lot about the future plans with Joe doing most of the talking. And then in Park we had a nice treat which lasted till 9pm after which we departed. Hostel guys went to Thotti jaya but subramani, musi and myself returned home.

Internals Over

Today i am free after finishing my second internals .Relieved from three days of mental pressure .Regarding my preformance in this internals it is not good . I thought of putting up of fine performance but that means i should be studying which i did not do. I have not done my compiler Design and DAA paper well . I am expecting very low marks in both these papers .Hope to do well in next internals atleast .

And today we are having a night lab for our department symposium but unfortunately i will not able to stay for it . My mom and dad have gone to Nagerkovil for my Brother's marriage and i should be taking care of my pet (Tommy) who would probably be sitting alone in house and waiting for my arrival .No problems we would be having atleast one more night lab and i can stay for that . On friday we have the software freedom day celebrations in our college and that would keep us busy tommorow .To end life is going normally without serious problems hope it continues the same way .

Cyber Website Launched

Preperations for our department National level Symposium is going on in a rapid pace. My part was to do the dynamic part of the Website i.e creating pages for Online Registration and Feedback Form .Everything was working fine during testing in local environment. But while launching the condition was not the same as we had expected. we encountered problems with establishing connection with the database . We searched the Docs ,Googled but everything seemed okay .We were not able to find and correct the problem on that evening .As a result we launched the site with static pages .Today we were able to identify the problem and we were able to correct it with just 30 minutes of work .Still there are some minor changes to be made in the code .We expect to finish everything tommorow .

I encounter problems when it touch something related to Apache,PHP and MYSQL but everytime i learn something new .Most of the time it is because of some unnoticed configuration details that needs to be enabled or disabled. Now everything looks fine .The next task is some thing related to file uploading for softwares and papers .

GNUGET Released

GNUGET ,a frontend for the Wget utility available in GNU/Linux was released by me on last month. I did it for the Linux Programming contest conducted in our college last year .When i submitted it for the contest it was good enough to be even considered as a software . I spent some days redeveloping the software during my semester holidays .Now it looks better than its older version .First i released it in geocities and then i registered a domain in dot Tk . GNUGET can be downloaded from the site www.gnuget.tk .I just preparing for my next project GMessenger ,an instant messenger that is can be used in GNU/Linux environment .It is planned to be developed as a team work by Subramani,Praveen and myself .Hope we finish it soon .

DB2 Certified

I am returning to blog after a very long interval .I got my IBM 700 certification on 24th of July ,and it was achieved without much effort . I just spent some two to three hours for the preparation along with my friends Subramani and Sriram .There were some 6 PDF's that were given as study materials . We didnot even look into it deeply .The questions were centered around basics of SQL and basic DB2 concepts and were easy.Funny to get a international certification with just two to three hours of study and without knowing much in depth about the concepts .Thanks to Ramji and Nirmal for their timely helps .Anyway i am happy about it and now i am just passing away my time listening to 'Anbae Aaruyire' songs .

Scheduler for AAOSK

Writing scheduler for an OS is more difficult than i thought . I had no clue about the scheduler at first . Thanks to joe he came up with a great idea of using function pointers to establish this .
After getting the idea coding was little easier and the schedular code grew day by day .It is growing steadily and is sure to be finished early .

Harry Potter

I read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of azkaban . Though i have read it late i didnot miss the thrill and suspense as i didnot know the story . The story was splendid filled with suspense and thrill till the last . And finally what a twist it was at the end . I had my test on the next day
but i was thrilled by the storyline and never took my book till i finished the story . I dont have the other books but i am determined to read the other books also .