Saturday, December 23, 2006
Thiruvilaiyadal : Comedy galore
Thiruvilaiyadal manages to keep the crowd roaring with laughter from the begining to the end. A great movie that comes with overdoze of humour. Thiruvilaiyadal rightly named potrays the game played by Dhanush with Prakash Raj. The story is the long existing story of a low class youth falling in love with the heroine. As usual it is love at the first sight. Dhanush falls in love with Shriya at the first sight. Shriya's brother Prakash Raj is the villain who tries to get rid of Dhanush from his sister. He fixes a price for Dhanush's love. Dhanush accepts the money, and how he uses the money and how he manages to get shriya form the rest of the story. Though the story is something that u see in most of the tamil movies, the way in which the story is handled in Thiru... is amazing. Dialogues are a major plus point. Dhanush performance masks every other thing. Some songs may capture attention. On the whole Thiru... is one of the great movie iatched after a long time.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Preparing disk images for running Bochs
This is the first step that i learnt before two years when i learning OS. But inspite of seniors best effort to make us understand i think we understood only half. It was proved when we were trying to run bochs for our final year project. The task was to create the disk images and to install grub in the disk images to boot our kernel. We had a vague idea about the steps that we followed in our second year and finally figured out the right way and understood a lot. Some juniors were also asking us about how to run bochs for the first time. So thought of posting about it.
Creating disk images : The first step would be to create disk images. The utility available with bochs called as bximage can be used to reate disk images. Create a floppy disk image by specifying fd as the disk type and a hard disk image of size 10MB by specifying hd as the disk type while using bximage.
Partitioning the hard disk image : Then the harddisk should be partitioned. For this purpose we use some small linux distributions ike dlxlinux. Using bochs boot with dlxlinux image as the master disk nd the created disk image as the slave. Once dlxlinux is booted use fdisk to partition the slave disk as "fdisk /dev/hdb". Create a new partition and then create ext2 filesystem on the partition using the command mk2efs /dev/hdb1.
Copying the grub files into the disk image: After partitioning the disk image file we should copy the grub files into the image. To do this attach the image file as a loop device and then mount the loop device. These steps will require root previlege
losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop/0 diskimage
mount /dev/loop/0 /mnt/loop
cp /boot/ /mnt/loop/
cp kernel /mnt/loop/boot
Edit the menu.lst file to boot the kernel.
umount /mnt/loop
losetup -d /dev/loop/0
Installing grub in the disk image: After the grub files are copied the next step is to install grub on the hard disk image. This is where the floppy disk image we created earlier comes into use. Attach the floppy disk image as a loop device and use grub-floppy command tocreate bootable floppy disk image. The commands would look like
losetup /dev/loop/0 floppyimage
grub-floppy /dev/loop/0
losetup -d /dev/loop/0
Once the boot floppy image is created edit the bochsrc file to boot from the floppy with our hard disk image as the master disk. Now bochs boots the floppy disk image and u get the grub command prompt. Once the grub command prompt is obtained follow the long established steps of root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0) to install grub on the harddisk image. Now u can test ur own kernel using bochs. Bochs reads its configuration setting from the file bochsrc. This is the file that instructs bochs about the master disk or slave disk or disk to boot etc.
Creating disk images : The first step would be to create disk images. The utility available with bochs called as bximage can be used to reate disk images. Create a floppy disk image by specifying fd as the disk type and a hard disk image of size 10MB by specifying hd as the disk type while using bximage.
Partitioning the hard disk image : Then the harddisk should be partitioned. For this purpose we use some small linux distributions ike dlxlinux. Using bochs boot with dlxlinux image as the master disk nd the created disk image as the slave. Once dlxlinux is booted use fdisk to partition the slave disk as "fdisk /dev/hdb". Create a new partition and then create ext2 filesystem on the partition using the command mk2efs /dev/hdb1.
Copying the grub files into the disk image: After partitioning the disk image file we should copy the grub files into the image. To do this attach the image file as a loop device and then mount the loop device. These steps will require root previlege
losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop/0 diskimage
mount /dev/loop/0 /mnt/loop
cp /boot/ /mnt/loop/
cp kernel /mnt/loop/boot
Edit the menu.lst file to boot the kernel.
umount /mnt/loop
losetup -d /dev/loop/0
Installing grub in the disk image: After the grub files are copied the next step is to install grub on the hard disk image. This is where the floppy disk image we created earlier comes into use. Attach the floppy disk image as a loop device and use grub-floppy command tocreate bootable floppy disk image. The commands would look like
losetup /dev/loop/0 floppyimage
grub-floppy /dev/loop/0
losetup -d /dev/loop/0
Once the boot floppy image is created edit the bochsrc file to boot from the floppy with our hard disk image as the master disk. Now bochs boots the floppy disk image and u get the grub command prompt. Once the grub command prompt is obtained follow the long established steps of root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0) to install grub on the harddisk image. Now u can test ur own kernel using bochs. Bochs reads its configuration setting from the file bochsrc. This is the file that instructs bochs about the master disk or slave disk or disk to boot etc.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Without system and Net
System crashed a week back bringing down all the plans i had for the semester holidays. Holidays turned out to be a boredom without the system and internet. Had many plans for the holidays but all were in a mess as my system crashed correctly at the first day of my sem hols. Was not able to check mails, chat, orkut or blog for a week. The problem is the entire processing stops after some time. When booted in windows it restarts just after loading the desktop. With linux it boots without problems and gdm runs without problems. But all stops after some time and no further processing occurs. So i configured linux and stopped almost all processes and gdm and now i can work in the shell for around 30 minutes. Spent the holidays reading the stories which i converted from lit to html a few weeks back. Thought it was due to the processor getting heated so i removed the processor, cleaned the processor fan and put it back but the same problem contnues. Still the problem continues and i am not sure what the problem may be. If someone can infer something abt the problem from my description post your ideas about what might be the problem. It may be useful.
Cricket after five years
It has been five years since i touched the cricket bat and played some good game of cricket. Finally it happened during the first day of the final semester. Three hours of non stop cricket. Though there were many plans in the morning it ended up with just 5 guys turning up in the afternoon. Could have been more if not for the ill health of Musi, subbi and vanni. Anyway it was great to play cricket again. It turned out to be a tiresome match with just three fielders covering the whole ground. Finally it ended at five in the evening. Came back home with a lot of hope to see the cricket match between India and SA. As expected the mighty eleven dashed the hopes of a billion :(
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Reading .lit files in GNU/Linux
With the start of holidays thought of starting the long forgotten habit of reading novels and story books again. lit files are confined to the windoze platform and are readable using MSReader. Searched for something in GNU/Linux to read lit files. There is no direct software to read lit files but there is something called convert lit which can be used to convert the lit file into html and opf and can be read on any platform. Convertlit can be downloaded as a single zip file from convertlit.com and is released under GPL. Installation is not a difficult task if u have libtomcrypt installed. libtomcrypt is a library that provides a rich set of integer functions that can be used for many crytpgraphic applications. libtommath can be downloaded from math.libtomcrypt.com. Once that is installed convertlit (clit) can be installed by using the following step.
1) Download the clit18src.zip file from convertlit.com and unzip it. Unziping it will produce a Readme file and two folders, lib and clit18.
2) $cd lib
3) make
4) $cd ../clit18
5) Change the Makefile and set the correct path of libtommath.a
6) $ make
That would install the clit in the system. The lit file can be converted using "clit filename.lit dirname/". To know more about the three mode of operations and about the command line options follow the unix tradition of "clit --help".
1) Download the clit18src.zip file from convertlit.com and unzip it. Unziping it will produce a Readme file and two folders, lib and clit18.
2) $cd lib
3) make
4) $cd ../clit18
5) Change the Makefile and set the correct path of libtommath.a
6) $ make
That would install the clit in the system. The lit file can be converted using "clit filename.lit dirname/". To know more about the three mode of operations and about the command line options follow the unix tradition of "clit --help".
Monday, November 13, 2006
The Last Lab
The seventh semester came to an end today with the end of internet programming lab practicals. I turned out to be little interesting. Being the first number in the batch i was offered a lot of options and my luck led me to the one i least wanted. The question was to develop an eshoping application in WSAD. There is no difficulty in programming in the question but that is the first time i am seeing WSAD. Finaly, i ended up using WSAD more like a text editor. Now it is all over and i have completed all the 14 labs without any problems like not getting the output or partial output etc. This also puts an end to the most hated Java Programming or to be more specific applet programming. I remember doing Applet programming right from my fourth semester and the same program of getting the value from text box and displaying output in another textbox has continued till my final year. It am still trying to understand why applets were given so much importance. Anyway with all those things over it is now time to ditch java for a few months.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Daemon in Python
A daemon to download xml file and to parse it and extract some links from it. That is not something difficult or something new but it happens to be my first script in Python. Programming in python turned out to be really interesting. Amazed to see the availablity of packages in python. I have heard people saying that Python is far more better than java. I dont have enough expertise in both the languages but python looks easy to me when compared to java. Looking forward to do something good in python. So for those who want to create a daemon in python, it is simple. Everything is available in the os package. It is similar to C, a fork and a exit.
try:
pid = os.fork()
except OSError, e:
"""raise exception"""
if (pid == 0):
"""operations"""
else:
os._exit(0)
That is all u need to create a daemon. I used the sched package to schedule the download of rss file repeatedly after some time interval and xml.dom.minidom to parse the file after it is downloaded. All took just some ten lines of code. Python rocks :)
try:
pid = os.fork()
except OSError, e:
"""raise exception"""
if (pid == 0):
"""operations"""
else:
os._exit(0)
That is all u need to create a daemon. I used the sched package to schedule the download of rss file repeatedly after some time interval and xml.dom.minidom to parse the file after it is downloaded. All took just some ten lines of code. Python rocks :)
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Varalaaru | Godfather: A comeback for Ajith
Varalaaru the latest box office hit in Tamilnadu may turn out to be a great comeback for Ajith. The movie is fast paced and does not disappoint anyone. I saw the film after AI exam where there was not much scope to display my own intelligence. We reached the theatre by around 2:30pm in the middle of the introduction song and were forced to sit on the fifth row. Looked to me like the theatre guys wanted to spread equality as there was not any distinction between the different tickets.
The movie sticks on firmly to the story and there was rarely a deviation from the main story line. There is not much heroism and not many unnecessary punch dialogues. Ajith seems to have done a lot of hard work and his acting is the most impressive feature of the movie. Ajith easily scores as the father and the psychic son. Asin looks pretty, comes then and there when we are about to forget that she is the heroine, dances in songs and leaves. Kanika(Enga school ponnu) has a bit more scope compared to Asin and has used the opportunity well. Other than that it is Ajith who rules. Looks like Ajith has regained his lost glory. No need to mention ARR as the songs were a hit even before one year. Three hours flies by, thanks to the fast paced and crisp narration by KSR.
Coming to the negatives, logics give way to actions in a number of situations. The story reminds you about some old films like theivamagan. The climax looks like something that u see in many of the tamil films. Apart from these the movie is great and is a huge entertainer. Would have enjoyed it to a greater extent if it was not for the fifth row seat.
The movie sticks on firmly to the story and there was rarely a deviation from the main story line. There is not much heroism and not many unnecessary punch dialogues. Ajith seems to have done a lot of hard work and his acting is the most impressive feature of the movie. Ajith easily scores as the father and the psychic son. Asin looks pretty, comes then and there when we are about to forget that she is the heroine, dances in songs and leaves. Kanika(Enga school ponnu) has a bit more scope compared to Asin and has used the opportunity well. Other than that it is Ajith who rules. Looks like Ajith has regained his lost glory. No need to mention ARR as the songs were a hit even before one year. Three hours flies by, thanks to the fast paced and crisp narration by KSR.
Coming to the negatives, logics give way to actions in a number of situations. The story reminds you about some old films like theivamagan. The climax looks like something that u see in many of the tamil films. Apart from these the movie is great and is a huge entertainer. Would have enjoyed it to a greater extent if it was not for the fifth row seat.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Top ten observations about megaserials
Out of blogging for a long time due to some DNS problems with my ISP. Anyway i am back and here is my post after a long time. This is just some of the observations made by me about mega serials and it is also the opinion of most of the youths here. I never watch megaserials and i usually get a glimpse of them while having dinner . Most of the observations are made when i am in extreme moods which occurs after i see the serial. So i don't claim them to be true or false.
1) Most of them are about a woman who has nothing in her life except problems. Problems of all sort come from all directions, from her friends, foes, relatives, passer by, dog, cat, ant, shit, bullshit ...
2) The role of heroine is mostly played by a retired movie actress and a whole bunch of others whom u can find in almost every serial from morning 10 to night 10.
3) Though there exist problem in every move, the heroine remains undeterred by those. She seems to have almost all good qualities that one could think of.
4) The number of people who dance for the title song exceeds the total number of characters in the serial.
5) The director seems to concentrate only on one thing, that is creating problems.
6) No problem has a solution. The problems exist till the very end and are usually solved at the final episode when the life long enemy suddenly becomes a dear friend . The older problems are pushed down the stack when new problems arise and are later popped out when the director runs out of ideas.
7) If director could not find any problems with existing characters new characters are introduced and new problems are created.
8 ) There is only one background music, the dull music that assists the sad atmosphere and puts the viewers in deep deep distress. 90% of the episodes have someone crying for something.
9) 10 minutes ads follow two to three lines of dialogue.
10) 90% of the guys are like me who have no other option other than something like this.
1) Most of them are about a woman who has nothing in her life except problems. Problems of all sort come from all directions, from her friends, foes, relatives, passer by, dog, cat, ant, shit, bullshit ...
2) The role of heroine is mostly played by a retired movie actress and a whole bunch of others whom u can find in almost every serial from morning 10 to night 10.
3) Though there exist problem in every move, the heroine remains undeterred by those. She seems to have almost all good qualities that one could think of.
4) The number of people who dance for the title song exceeds the total number of characters in the serial.
5) The director seems to concentrate only on one thing, that is creating problems.
6) No problem has a solution. The problems exist till the very end and are usually solved at the final episode when the life long enemy suddenly becomes a dear friend . The older problems are pushed down the stack when new problems arise and are later popped out when the director runs out of ideas.
7) If director could not find any problems with existing characters new characters are introduced and new problems are created.
8 ) There is only one background music, the dull music that assists the sad atmosphere and puts the viewers in deep deep distress. 90% of the episodes have someone crying for something.
9) 10 minutes ads follow two to three lines of dialogue.
10) 90% of the guys are like me who have no other option other than something like this.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Godfather | Varalaaru Storyline
After much delay and struggle the much awaited Ajith's film Godfather renamed as Varalaaru is going released for this Diwali. It has created a lot of hype and happiness among ajith fans. I got a glimpse of the storyline of the film in one of the tamil daily in barber's shop. The story is cool but also reminds us about some old movies. The story goes on like this. Ajith is a bharathanatiyam dancer and in the process he develops some characteristics like that of women. Ajith falls in love with kanika and proposes to marry her. Kanika rejects saying that she is not willing to marry ajith with all his women like characteristics. On this Ajith loses his temper, kidnaps kanika and rapes her. Kanika gives birth to two Ajiths. Two Ajiths are completely opposite in character, one good natured policeman and another a rowdy. The rest of the story continues with bad ajith trying to cause harm and the good one trying to prevent that. In between we have Asin, on whose role i have no clue. This is just an outline of the story and with all twists and turns and confusions among the two Ajiths this film may end the long long wait of ajith's fans for a good film from their thala.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The final chapter of my College life
The seventh semester classes ended last week with just exams remaining. That would take another one slow month. I backtracked a little and thought what i learnt during the whole seventh semester. A great accomplishment indeed, i have successfully completed one semester without learning anything new :) It is easy to describe what i did during the whole semester.
for (; ; )
{
sleep (21600000);
chat_with_friends ();
watch_tv();
sleep (36000000);
}
Just one more semester to finish of my college life and enter into the corporate world. Hope the semester goes fine like the seventh semester but with a little learning and little concentration on my project. I never repented for wasting time in the seventh semester. Like how Tom says to Jerry "i know what i am doing may be bad.. still i am enjoying it". I would not be getting the college atmosphere anywhere. I think it is high time that i have some fun, movies, cricket... Hope the final chapter of my college life goes good.
for (; ; )
{
sleep (21600000);
chat_with_friends ();
watch_tv();
sleep (36000000);
}
Just one more semester to finish of my college life and enter into the corporate world. Hope the semester goes fine like the seventh semester but with a little learning and little concentration on my project. I never repented for wasting time in the seventh semester. Like how Tom says to Jerry "i know what i am doing may be bad.. still i am enjoying it". I would not be getting the college atmosphere anywhere. I think it is high time that i have some fun, movies, cricket... Hope the final chapter of my college life goes good.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Signing Off in Style
Schumacher has returned to the top of form after the much dramatic Chinese grand prix. Schumacher has got it right what players like ganguly missed. Bowing out of the arena with glory at its peak. The chinese grand prix was more dramatic with fortune switching from one to another. First it was kimi who was in great form and as the track began to dry it was the great champion who returned to form. It was funny to see Fisichella protecting the defending champion during the middle of the race. At that time Alonso did not look like a world champion at all. If Fisichella has not taken up that job he would have got a better opportunity. Schumacher showed great quality through out the race and is in great form. Hope he carries the same form to the remaining two races and wins the Brazilian and Japan grand prix.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Device Driver For Goatee
That is the title of my final year project. Just started looking into the present state of goaTee. Thanks to the beautifully written docs by our seniors. We started it with just the passion for operating system development driving us into the project. My first experience with the operating system development was with AAOSK - Application adaptive operating system kernel. That was a great oppurtunity for us to get some feel of operating system development. Though our part in AAOSK is very small that gave us the oppurtunity to know about some GNU tools, difficulty in OS development and of course we listened to some beautiful lectures by our seniors. Now i am back with OS development and with greater aims and greater responsiblities. I am still reading the documents and to be more specific still searching for documents that would give some information about the device driver development, but could not get much.
Yesterday we had the zeroth review of the project and it went pretty cool. The questions were easy and the review lasted for about twenty minutes. Now it is time to do some hard work and start the implementation. For those who want to take a look at the presentation that we did for the review it is available here
Yesterday we had the zeroth review of the project and it went pretty cool. The questions were easy and the review lasted for about twenty minutes. Now it is time to do some hard work and start the implementation. For those who want to take a look at the presentation that we did for the review it is available here
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
xmms -> gxine -> MPlayer
Successfully installed MPlayer in my GNU/Linux box yesterday. When i first started using GNU/Linux i was using XMMS, then moved to gxine as xmms didnot have support for wma files by default. Now it is time for MPlayer. For those who do not know what MPlayer is, MPlayer is a versatile movie player in GNU/Linux and has support for most of the audio/video formats. I was searching for a command line player in GNU/Linux desparately for the sole purpose of making Emacs play songs. First i was trying to use mpg123 and mpg321. Both experienced some problem with liboss which i did not understand. Some said alsa should be configured for mpg321 to run, but i was not able to do that. So switched to MPlayer. MPlayer installation was not at all difficult and it went fine without any probs. Next task would be to configure Emacs to use MPlayer and to play songs in Emacs. I cant prevent myself from wondering what all can Emacs do. Emacs seems to do everything. Will update soon if i configure emacs to play songs.
Friday, September 22, 2006
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 .
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Sillunu Oru Kadhal : Slow Screenplay Spoils everything
SOK the last movie for surya and Jothika before their marriage has not turned out like what they might have expected. The only plus point in the movie is the music by ARR. I saw the movie after FStival along with my friends and Seniors. Surya as usual has done his role perfectly. Boomika and Baby Shreya look cute. Santhanam and Vadivelu dont have much to do. After seeing the movie my interest in SOK songs has decreased a bit. In particular the "Newyork Nagaram" song looked just like a presentation. I was trying to resist the sleep but the movie was trying the other way. In short the storyline was not impressing, screenplay is slower than the snail, Sillune oru kadhal lacks chillness.
Monday, September 18, 2006
FStival'06
September 16th, a big day for the FLOSS guys around the world. When the whole world celebrates it under different names, we celebrate it here in Madurai under the name FStival which means Free Software Festival. FStival is jointly organized by GNU/Linux user group - Madurai and GNU/Linux user group of TCE. It was special to us for two reasons, one it would be the last FStival we organized as students, second due to the presence of most of the seniors or say founders of GLUGOT.
This year FStival was a great success with students from all over Madurai attending the event. The auditorium was packed with a overwhelming crowd of around 350. The chief guest for this year FStival was Mr. Kenneth Gonsalves from NRC - FOSS @ AU-KBC, chennai. Mr. Kenneth, a renowned geek in the FOSS world, gave an inspiring talk on "How FOSS makes you a great programmer". This was followed by the on stage Installation Debian session. Then it was time for XGL to steal the show. With cubes rotating while switching desktops, wobbling windows and menus, XGL looked great.
After all this came the most interesting part, the demo stalls. Thanks to the second year and third year students. They did their job well. They explained about the various tools in GNU/Linux starting from FOSS, Basic commands, Emacs, GCC, GIMP, GTK+ Glade, Games, Live CD & Education tools, Scilab, XGL, Latex, LAMP, Databases, CMS etc. They were also bombarded with a lot many questions from the enthusiastic crowd. It was a tough job indeed, explaining the same thing to more than 300. The CD burning students were kept busy all the time as they continued to receive CDs for burning various distributions. Hats off to all the juniors. The software freedom day ended with the demo stalls closing in the evening. In the mean time Sriram and myself managed to take some snaps of the whole event. Sriram also has a video of XGL demo. We would be publishing them soon in glugot and glug-madurai site.
On sunday it was great to see the software freedom day celebration as a news item in Dinamalar and Dinakaran. Thanks to the press people for spending their valuable time with us.
This year FStival was a great success with students from all over Madurai attending the event. The auditorium was packed with a overwhelming crowd of around 350. The chief guest for this year FStival was Mr. Kenneth Gonsalves from NRC - FOSS @ AU-KBC, chennai. Mr. Kenneth, a renowned geek in the FOSS world, gave an inspiring talk on "How FOSS makes you a great programmer". This was followed by the on stage Installation Debian session. Then it was time for XGL to steal the show. With cubes rotating while switching desktops, wobbling windows and menus, XGL looked great.
After all this came the most interesting part, the demo stalls. Thanks to the second year and third year students. They did their job well. They explained about the various tools in GNU/Linux starting from FOSS, Basic commands, Emacs, GCC, GIMP, GTK+ Glade, Games, Live CD & Education tools, Scilab, XGL, Latex, LAMP, Databases, CMS etc. They were also bombarded with a lot many questions from the enthusiastic crowd. It was a tough job indeed, explaining the same thing to more than 300. The CD burning students were kept busy all the time as they continued to receive CDs for burning various distributions. Hats off to all the juniors. The software freedom day ended with the demo stalls closing in the evening. In the mean time Sriram and myself managed to take some snaps of the whole event. Sriram also has a video of XGL demo. We would be publishing them soon in glugot and glug-madurai site.
On sunday it was great to see the software freedom day celebration as a news item in Dinamalar and Dinakaran. Thanks to the press people for spending their valuable time with us.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
FOSS in Syllabus
One more major step towards the development of FOSS in our college. FOSS has become a part of the syllabus for the computer Science students. So computer science students would be having FOSS as compulsory elective in their eigth semester. Anna university has already added FOSS as a subject, and it has happened in our college now. Still there is no clue about the syllabus but anyway it is going to be very very interesting. Looking forward for the FOSS classes in eigth semester.
tvslakshmischool.org
Yesterday i got the link to my school website . I do not know whether my school had the website when i was studying there. But now it is there. The site looks cool and has been designed using PHP(one of my favourite languages). They also have a separate login for alumni. I registered myself as as alumni there. I am still unable to accept the fact that i am an alumni of the prestigious institution. The memories are still fresh. Those were glorius moments to be forgetted soon. I have not explored the site fully. If you happen to be a alumni of TVSLMHSS and if have not visited it yet. Go to tvslakshmischool.org andexplore. You will feel a little nostalgic.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Book exhibition in Madurai
Went to the book exhibition that has been going for the past few weeks in Madurai. Mayoor and myself went to the exhibition. The exhibition has attracted a lot of madurai dwellers and i never expected to see a crowd like that there. Some were not interested in books and were spending their time like in picnic, eating panchumittai and millagai bajji. There were numerous stalls displaying wide varieties of books. Though there were a number of stalls for english and technical books, the number of tamil book stalls out numbered them. Did not look more into the details of the books available there. Most of the them contained biographies, autobiographies and small stories.
The english books were hosted in stalls of famous book stores like Malligai, Turning point, HB etc. These were the stalls that attracted me a lot. When i saw Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham etc neatly arranged in shelf the lost desire of reading novels like this resurfaced. I remember reading a lot of novels during my school days and the habit slowly died out. The reason my school library was a huge repository of all these books. I would say that it had enough books to fuel the thirst of hungry students. Thats where i started reading Enid Blyton, Hardy boys, Nancy Drew and later switched over Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham etc. That habit slowly died out once i left the school. Still i would like to visit the school library once again just to see the collection they have.
Coming back to the book fair, i left the stalls with the desire of getting a novel increasing every moment i was waiting there. Managed to collect some tamil books and left the stalls. How we got out of the stalls is an interesting story. The entire place was fully packed and no effort was needed. The crowd kept pushing and we were out after some struggle. The stalls should have been little larger. Other than that is a good place to spend some time.
The english books were hosted in stalls of famous book stores like Malligai, Turning point, HB etc. These were the stalls that attracted me a lot. When i saw Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham etc neatly arranged in shelf the lost desire of reading novels like this resurfaced. I remember reading a lot of novels during my school days and the habit slowly died out. The reason my school library was a huge repository of all these books. I would say that it had enough books to fuel the thirst of hungry students. Thats where i started reading Enid Blyton, Hardy boys, Nancy Drew and later switched over Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham etc. That habit slowly died out once i left the school. Still i would like to visit the school library once again just to see the collection they have.
Coming back to the book fair, i left the stalls with the desire of getting a novel increasing every moment i was waiting there. Managed to collect some tamil books and left the stalls. How we got out of the stalls is an interesting story. The entire place was fully packed and no effort was needed. The crowd kept pushing and we were out after some struggle. The stalls should have been little larger. Other than that is a good place to spend some time.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Hello World
Hello world. This is my first post in wordpress. I was a blogger user till now and recently switched over to wordpress seeing that wordpress has some really good features when compared to blogger. Blogger has not changed a bit and i hate adding an external hit counter and calendar to my blog. What really impressed me in wordpress is the categorization of posts. I dont know whether blogger is great or wordpress is. I started to lose interest in blogger and i am here blogging in wordpress. Wordpress looks cool to me now. That explains why i am here. To know more about me and about the what u will find here click the 'About' link.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
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.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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.
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.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
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.
Friday, July 14, 2006
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.
Friday, July 07, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Back to normal
Three to four weeks of tension, trepidation, alacrity .... Now it is all over. Atlast offer from a company which is a part of India's largest business conglomerate. The selection process was simple and good, starting with aptitude which was online. It was followed by the technical and HR interview which tested the communication skills and little of prudence. Following this was the one day wait for the results. That proved to be a long wait with anxiety increasing every single moment. And finally it is all over and the result was positive for me. So now back to normal work and normal life which is proving out to be more monotonous and mechanical.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Interesting C Question
A simple C question, What is the maximum size occupied by a structure? This question was asked by R* after reading some C books as a part of his placement preperation. The question is very very simple still i wanted to check how many are like me.
#include
int
main ()
{
struct simple
{
int a,b,d;
char c[2];
}tmpob;
int size;
size = sizeof (tmpob);
printf ("Total size of structure : %d\n",size);
return 0;
}
Predict the answer and give some explanation so that i may know the answer.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Consistent team ever
Just five more days to go for the FIFA world cup. With all the warm up matches over, the whole world is waiting for the great event to unfold. Wonder where India is ? They are in a very formidable 117th position. They have successfully retained their 117th position for the second year. No one to challenge them for their position. They should have done a lot of work to stay in that position. Hats of to them. Waiting to see who is going to win the contest. Too many contenders b razil, england, germany, france etc.... but my support goes to brazil and france.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Stepping into Final year
The VI semester exams came to an end on may27 and with that ended the eventful third year. The third year went fine except for the marks which continued the same decreasing trend. A lot happened in the last year like gr8 gr8 CAS, department symposium which still remains fresh in my memories, fabulous FStival '05, interesting intra and inter department contests, spicy industrial visit, numerous night labs, fun with seniors, thiki thenarum seminars, delicious treats (delicious till u dont spend) and a lot more. Fun and work constituted third year. All that has ended and now its time to take up the new role, the final year and senior most students of the college. A lot more may come this year results,placements,fun etc etc etc ........
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Virus....Virus...Virus
Thats how my windoze desktop looked when i connected to net when my system was under the attack of viruses. All because of some new viruses with names win32host.exe, smss.exe, lsass.exe etc. Googling said they are called Trojan.systemposer and are capable of sending mass spams, modifying the registry runkey to start them when system is rebooted, spying on keystrokes and exploring the vulnerabilities of other running processes. They seem to do a lot of work than all other processes running in my system. There were around 23 infected files, and with antivirus updates and GNU/Linux i was able to remove some. Still some remain and continue to disturb me. Silly to spend more time and resource to guard the OS than working on it.Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Fighting for a good cause
A good move by the medical college students in the northern states. It is good to see students voicing out their view against the government, which sticks on to the old customs that no longer exist. For example in TN when an OC candidate with 280 cutoff mark struggles to get a seat in a good Engg. college some get it easily with 270,260 or even 240. What is to be pitied here is that the student with 240 is socially and economically well established and has more oppurtunities than the poor OC guy. This is how quotas are used or to be more apt misused. Today everyone has equal oppurtunity. Reservation policy looks like an attempt to lure poor people and to maintain their support. If at all the government wants to help them they may find a method to provide all with good education so that they could get the seat by themselves rather than relying on the idiotic schemes which are to be rendered obsolete. I think students will understand that it is talent that will help the country's growth and not all these craps. The students will surely succeed as long as politics doesnot play spoilsport.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Words of Wisdom
From Robert Langdon's thoughts in Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons"
"Faith does not protect you. Medicine and airbags.... those are the things that protect you. God does not protect you. Intelligence protects you. Enlightenment. Put your faith in something with tangible results. How long has it been since someone walked on water? Modern miracles belong to science....computer, vaccines, space stations...........who needs god? No! Science is god.
Seems to be true.
"Faith does not protect you. Medicine and airbags.... those are the things that protect you. God does not protect you. Intelligence protects you. Enlightenment. Put your faith in something with tangible results. How long has it been since someone walked on water? Modern miracles belong to science....computer, vaccines, space stations...........who needs god? No! Science is god.
Seems to be true.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Internals Schedule
Third internals started on Monday keeping all busy for six days. The schedule has been quite tight the whole week. This was my schedule for the third internals
Afternoon & Evening : Come back from college at around 2:00pm. Too tired to start studying. Better sleep after a heavy lunch. Wake up at around 5:00 pm. All work and no play makes sen a dull boy. So better play for around 1/2 hrs. It would not be nice to shutdown the system without listening to songs. So listen to songs for 1/2 hrs.Now the time is 6.00pm. The evening looks pleasant. Go for a walk and come back by around 6:30pm.Call Nirmal and ask for the important questions. Spend the next 30 minutes creating the schedule. It turns out to be an optimistic schedule, 3 units for the night and two to be completed in the morning.
Night: Start studying the first question by around 7:15pm and continue till 8:15pm. The subjects are like rocket science. Mom and Dad arrive from office so spend some time with them. Suddenly the time becomes 9.00pm.Its time for dinner. Hmm the dinner also tastes good. So have a good dinner watching songs or serials in TV. Now the time is around 10.00pm, lot of portion to complete. Try studying the units sincerely, unfortunately end up sleeping in the chair. Dad asks to go to sleep(with a little anger). Obey him immediately. Set the alarm at 2.00am and go to sleep at around 10.30pm with just only one question completed.
Next Day morning : Wake up at around 5.00am. Wonder why the alarm did not strike and who switched it off at 2.00am. Too sleepy to study. Forgot to check mails yesterday so check mails,orkut and blogs for 1/2 hour. The time is around 5.30am. Still 4 and 1/2 units to complete. Start studying intensively. Newspaper boy comes at around 6.30am. Not knowing what is happening around the world would be bad. Spend 15 Min for sports and cinema news. Oops time is 7.00am. Got to catch A5 so that i could get a seat and use the 30 minutes in the bus effectively :), so it is time get started. Manage to catch B5 at the last minute that means it is not possible to open the book in the bus. Somehow manage to complete around 2 units in the bus and in between 9 and 9.30.
In the Exam Hall : Get the question paper. The first look of the question paper gives an impression that the question paper does not belong to us. Look at it keenly and laugh (looks to me like greek and latin). See praveen and musi, thank god they are also laughing. Start putting margins to all pages since that is going to be the only good thing in the answer sheets. Oh God ! the two marks are a little tough, compulsory question is not the expected one, no hope of touching questions from 4th and 5th unit. Write something in the paper for 3hours and get prepared to repeat all this for the next exam.
Net result : The internal marks may get a little lower. The probability of continuing the bad run in the externals gets a little higher.
Afternoon & Evening : Come back from college at around 2:00pm. Too tired to start studying. Better sleep after a heavy lunch. Wake up at around 5:00 pm. All work and no play makes sen a dull boy. So better play for around 1/2 hrs. It would not be nice to shutdown the system without listening to songs. So listen to songs for 1/2 hrs.Now the time is 6.00pm. The evening looks pleasant. Go for a walk and come back by around 6:30pm.Call Nirmal and ask for the important questions. Spend the next 30 minutes creating the schedule. It turns out to be an optimistic schedule, 3 units for the night and two to be completed in the morning.
Night: Start studying the first question by around 7:15pm and continue till 8:15pm. The subjects are like rocket science. Mom and Dad arrive from office so spend some time with them. Suddenly the time becomes 9.00pm.Its time for dinner. Hmm the dinner also tastes good. So have a good dinner watching songs or serials in TV. Now the time is around 10.00pm, lot of portion to complete. Try studying the units sincerely, unfortunately end up sleeping in the chair. Dad asks to go to sleep(with a little anger). Obey him immediately. Set the alarm at 2.00am and go to sleep at around 10.30pm with just only one question completed.
Next Day morning : Wake up at around 5.00am. Wonder why the alarm did not strike and who switched it off at 2.00am. Too sleepy to study. Forgot to check mails yesterday so check mails,orkut and blogs for 1/2 hour. The time is around 5.30am. Still 4 and 1/2 units to complete. Start studying intensively. Newspaper boy comes at around 6.30am. Not knowing what is happening around the world would be bad. Spend 15 Min for sports and cinema news. Oops time is 7.00am. Got to catch A5 so that i could get a seat and use the 30 minutes in the bus effectively :), so it is time get started. Manage to catch B5 at the last minute that means it is not possible to open the book in the bus. Somehow manage to complete around 2 units in the bus and in between 9 and 9.30.
In the Exam Hall : Get the question paper. The first look of the question paper gives an impression that the question paper does not belong to us. Look at it keenly and laugh (looks to me like greek and latin). See praveen and musi, thank god they are also laughing. Start putting margins to all pages since that is going to be the only good thing in the answer sheets. Oh God ! the two marks are a little tough, compulsory question is not the expected one, no hope of touching questions from 4th and 5th unit. Write something in the paper for 3hours and get prepared to repeat all this for the next exam.
Net result : The internal marks may get a little lower. The probability of continuing the bad run in the externals gets a little higher.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Entitled to Elect
Last week i got my voter's identification card and from now on my vote may play a vital role in determining the fate of India :) provided someone doesnot use it before i go to the polling station. I was asked to come to take photo for the identification card on March 8. My second internal exams started on 9th so i had time on wednesday afternoon to take the photo. The way in which the photo was taken is something unforgetable. The photographer came so close and he might have kissed me i he had been a little more closer. Finaly the photo was taken with the digicam just a centimeter or so away from the tip of my nose. I expected the photo to be beautiful considering the way the photo was taken. I received the identification card two days later as the lamination material was not available on that day. What i thought didnot go wrong, the photo was too good that even i could not take a second look of my picture there. So beautifully taken. I learnt from the card that i could use the card as identification card for other government purposes. But i dont think it would serve to identify me as most of the information seem to belong to some sen and surely they dont belong to me.
I lost track of what is going on in the politics of TamilNadu in the recent days. No clue about which all parties have formed what alliance. It is surprising to see how politicians could change sides so quickly. They keep talking about party's policy and kolgai always but when elections are announced all seem to evaporate so suddenly. Adding to all these are the new parties formed by actors. It is interesting to watch the campaigns of the actors, their talk is filled with punch dialogues and uncountable number of promises. Amidst all these i heard that 5 IIT graduates are going to contest. This is a good news and it would be much better if every contestant is well learned.
I lost track of what is going on in the politics of TamilNadu in the recent days. No clue about which all parties have formed what alliance. It is surprising to see how politicians could change sides so quickly. They keep talking about party's policy and kolgai always but when elections are announced all seem to evaporate so suddenly. Adding to all these are the new parties formed by actors. It is interesting to watch the campaigns of the actors, their talk is filled with punch dialogues and uncountable number of promises. Amidst all these i heard that 5 IIT graduates are going to contest. This is a good news and it would be much better if every contestant is well learned.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
CAS in Action
Hurray!! After a tiresome work on saturday CAS-Central Authentication System popularly called Single Sign On came into effect. We have been working on this for about three months starting from December. We started this on December without a single hint about what we are supposed to do. It was like walking in the dark forest, knowing nothing about our next step. But all went fine under seniors guidance and here we are, at the edge of a finishing it. Still a lot of loose ends to be tied up and everything would be fine once all are done. Lot of problems are sure to occur. Hope everything goes fine without problem.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Staying in touch with TVSLMHSS
This is all about the community for TVSLMHSS in orkut. For those who donot know about TVSLMHSS, it is a well known school in Tamilnadu and it was there i did my schooling. I was not aware of what was happening there in the school and how is it going after i left. Thanks to orkut, it has linked me again with the school or atleast with the students and alumni of my old school. Orkut has an active community for TVSLMHSS with 199 members and the owner is Guruguhan Meenakshisundaram. The discussions going on there reminded me about the classes. One such discussion was about their favourite teacher. It was interesting to read the replies. Most of them quoted Mr.Balu,our english teacher as their favourite and their replies contained a number of his famous and interesting dialogues. I felt like sitting in my class on reading thosee replies. I enjoyed the seven years i studied there. It was something great, the teachers were cool and understanding, the whole environment rocked. My memories are still fresh and i could go on talking about that for one full day but i have no intention of doing that.
And about the recent developments in the school, Mr.Sudhakaran has left the school so it is the turn of Mrs.Uma Ramesh of Maths department to act as the principal of the school. And Mr.Ramesh sir of Biology department is the vice principal. My favourite teacher Nagarajan sir of the physics department is the assistant principal. Mr.Rajkumar of biology department has left the school and is working as the vice principal in chethana school in Madurai. This is what i got from orkut and i am not sure how much of it is true. And i think they have purchased some more buses increasing the count further.
And about the recent developments in the school, Mr.Sudhakaran has left the school so it is the turn of Mrs.Uma Ramesh of Maths department to act as the principal of the school. And Mr.Ramesh sir of Biology department is the vice principal. My favourite teacher Nagarajan sir of the physics department is the assistant principal. Mr.Rajkumar of biology department has left the school and is working as the vice principal in chethana school in Madurai. This is what i got from orkut and i am not sure how much of it is true. And i think they have purchased some more buses increasing the count further.
Monday, February 27, 2006
My Google Page
I got my google home page. Just created a simple page today. Contains nothing other than two links to this page and to my gnuget site. It has a lot of templates to choose from and all look good satisfying the tastes of wide variety of people. Lot to explore . Will continue this post after a bit of exploration. If u want to see the page i created today, visit
http://sens2003.googlepages.com
Monday, February 20, 2006
Disappointing Performance by Indian U/19 Team
It was a very disappointing performance by the indian U/19 team in the finals of U/19 world cup. I thought they would continue their unbeaten streak and return home with the cup. They bowled well to restrict Pak to 110 but Indian batting was something unexpected. I saw them trying desparately at 10-6 in 3.2 overs to save the match and lost all my hopes of India winning the cup. I didnot see the full match so no idea of what went wrong. Anyway 10-6 that to with 5 extras is something which i didnot expect. i think they lost the match finaly.
Team India In Great Form
Congrats to the Indian cricket team for their absolutely mesmerizing performance in Pakistan. India thrashed Pak 4-1 to win the series comfortably. India showed brilliance in all areas. The morale of the whole team would be very high after the series. The most important aspect in the win is the role played by the young players. The youngsters occupied the centre stage and senior players like Dravid and Sachin backed them up and provided the neccessary encouragement. The strategy followed by Indian team was realy amazing and the credit goes to the captain and the coach.
I had the oppurtunity to see the a part of the final match of the series. I came back in time to see the batting of Dravid, yuvraj and Dhoni. Yuvi and Dhoni were in great form through out the series. Their batting proved to be a cynosure to all eyes throughout the series. Yuvraj has been pretty consistent in this series. Yuvraj took the responsiblity and saw to that India won the final match comfortably. Though he was limping with cramps he made sure that India walk through the match with ease. Dhoni provided a excellent finish to the match with some thunderous sixes. Yuvraj and Dhoni's batting were absolute feast to the eyes. Dravid's role should not be underestimated. Because it was he who along with Yuvraj laid a very foundation preserving the wickets and making it easy for Dhoni at the end to go on with shots. On the whole India showed great confidence and temperment. The youngster took up the challenge and performed whenever needed. It was great to see youngsters like RP Singh and Sreesanth rising up to the occasion with some great performances.
On the other hand Pak though they were able to put up high targets they lacked depth in their bowling without Akthar. I was not able to see the other matches but in the final match their fielding was a little worse. They missed some catches and too many runouts. There were also some overthrows which in the end reduced pressure on India and made it easy for them. Pak batsmen and bowlers have a lot of work to be done.
I had the oppurtunity to see the a part of the final match of the series. I came back in time to see the batting of Dravid, yuvraj and Dhoni. Yuvi and Dhoni were in great form through out the series. Their batting proved to be a cynosure to all eyes throughout the series. Yuvraj has been pretty consistent in this series. Yuvraj took the responsiblity and saw to that India won the final match comfortably. Though he was limping with cramps he made sure that India walk through the match with ease. Dhoni provided a excellent finish to the match with some thunderous sixes. Yuvraj and Dhoni's batting were absolute feast to the eyes. Dravid's role should not be underestimated. Because it was he who along with Yuvraj laid a very foundation preserving the wickets and making it easy for Dhoni at the end to go on with shots. On the whole India showed great confidence and temperment. The youngster took up the challenge and performed whenever needed. It was great to see youngsters like RP Singh and Sreesanth rising up to the occasion with some great performances.
On the other hand Pak though they were able to put up high targets they lacked depth in their bowling without Akthar. I was not able to see the other matches but in the final match their fielding was a little worse. They missed some catches and too many runouts. There were also some overthrows which in the end reduced pressure on India and made it easy for them. Pak batsmen and bowlers have a lot of work to be done.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Godfather Song Release
Godfather songs had a grand release today morning in the city with the ultimate star's fans gathering around keestukaanam shop and i heard that there were also paal abhishekams performed to the hero's cutout. I heard all this from my friend Vanniaperumal, a great fan of Ajith. He managed to wake up at 5am and went to the shop to buy the CD. He waited till 7:30 for the arrival of CD and it was he who witnessed all this.
Then coming to the songs in the movie ARR has scored again. The movie has around nine songs and the songs rock. Work of a great maestro, it is sure to rock . I heard the songs around 8 times yesterday and are wonderful. Vanni managed to download two demo video songs from some site. The quality of the video was not good but viewable. Both are duet songs and i managed to catch a glimpse of Asin. Asin looks great in both the songs. She looks slim, young and beautiful, set to steal the hearts of youth. "Thinanthorum Deepavali" song created serious doubts about the character of Asin in the movie. But smartsara cleared my doubts. Sara is really smart when it comes to movies. And after listening to the song many times now i am convinced. The trailor of Godfather also looks good. I saw it in Vijay tv and it runs for about 5 minutes. I feel Godfather will be the film that will help Ajith regain his lost glory. Hope it does.
Trip to Kerala
Relieved from normal work and the college for two days, thanks to the industrial visit to Trivandrum. The IV was on Monday and Tuesday that is on 13th and 14th of February. It turned out to be a great tour which is to be remembered throughout. We started at around 1am on Monday morning in two buses one for each section. It was where the fun started. All were on their feet dancing and rocked the whole bus with their dances and slogans. As usual there were a number of Ohs and Salabula Salabula Gumthalakaa during the journey. There were also guys like me who stayed calm and enjoyed watching the dance of others. Some guys even managed to sleep amidst all this excitement.Our first stop was at Kanyakumari to see the sunrise. We were on time and were hoping to see the beautiful sight of sun spreading it wings over the blue waters of the Kanyakumari. But as usual the clouds were there to hide everything and disappoint us. We managed to take some good snaps there and continued our journey to Trivandrum. We reached the place at around 10am. Our stay was at a superb cottage called as Rajmahal. The rooms were neat and the whole place looked cool. We visited BSNL on that day. One thing that deserves special mention is the food and hotels in kerala. We had our breakfast at Udipi hotel. The food was good and cheap. But something that still puzzles me is the way food were served in hotels. When we order a single dosa the served us with two dosas and a vada. Probably they thought we were hungry and needed more food than what we ordered. In the afternoon we were late for lunch and were not able to find any hotels. We were hungry so we decided to eat NV for dinner. We managed to find a small NV hotel. The dishes were cheap but too spicy that it brought tears in eyes. My friend Shanoof went to the extent of pouring water on chicken before eating it. Finally we left the hotel with stomachs burning. We had a great sleep after the dumb sherades in the cottage.
The next day schedule consisted of visit to Padhmanabapuram samy temple, US technology. US Technology is a company in Technopark and it is basically a IT service company. They explained us about their company practices and we had an opportunity to visit their office. After that we started our journey back to Madurai after dinner at Nagerkovil. We reached Mdu at around 5:30 in Wednesday morning and i reached home at around 7.
More snaps at http://www.flickr.com/photos/senthilkumaran
The next day schedule consisted of visit to Padhmanabapuram samy temple, US technology. US Technology is a company in Technopark and it is basically a IT service company. They explained us about their company practices and we had an opportunity to visit their office. After that we started our journey back to Madurai after dinner at Nagerkovil. We reached Mdu at around 5:30 in Wednesday morning and i reached home at around 7.
More snaps at http://www.flickr.com/photos/senthilkumaran
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Back with a Bang
The indian team is back into the series with a comprehensive win in the second ODI against their arch rivals. It was a decent performance by the indian team both in batting and in bowling. Men in blue showed their class through out the game leaving the opponents gasping for runs during their batting and for wickets when India batted. Sehwag started the chase with some thunderous shots and sent the ball all over the field and played a major role in shattering the confidence of the opponents.. Tendulkar played with patience and did his part well. Later Yuvraj and Dravid made it possible for India to win the match comfortably. Indian batsmen never allowed the opponent bowlers to take advantage. Atleast they will not have disturbing comments after this match.
The performance of Indian team in the first ODI was really gr8. If sachin had not been given out to a silly appeal the score would have been much higher. Much to my annoyance the topic that was much discussed after the match was the dismissal of the captain of the opponent team. If at all there is something to be discussed then it is the dismissal of Sachin. And someone criticized Dravid stating that it was not sportsmanship to appeal like that. I would say that the true sportsmanship is to leave the field when the umpires give him out and not to comment about it further. The worst comment that i read in newspaper was "India wanted to win the match desperately either by hook or crook" which was said by a famous cricketer. When we look at the history of cricket we can easily determine the team which has the habit of tampering the ball and using crooky technicques to win the match and surely it was not India. So far Indians have played the game in a way how it is to be played, that is with true sportsmanship and like gentlemen. When we look at the end of first match we can easily find the team which was desperate to leave the field. The weather condition was the same through out the match. Probably if the score was three eleven for five they would have continued till the end of match. Probably i was a bit tensed after seeing the comments about the indian team. Anyway the match is over and i am not a great player to comment about the match.
One more information I started typing this post last night and i slept leaving the computer on. I woke up in the morning startled to see my computer still running. I switched on my computer at around 10 in night and i slept leaving the computer on and i woke up around 7 in the morning. This is not the first time that i am doing this. Should not repeat this again.
The performance of Indian team in the first ODI was really gr8. If sachin had not been given out to a silly appeal the score would have been much higher. Much to my annoyance the topic that was much discussed after the match was the dismissal of the captain of the opponent team. If at all there is something to be discussed then it is the dismissal of Sachin. And someone criticized Dravid stating that it was not sportsmanship to appeal like that. I would say that the true sportsmanship is to leave the field when the umpires give him out and not to comment about it further. The worst comment that i read in newspaper was "India wanted to win the match desperately either by hook or crook" which was said by a famous cricketer. When we look at the history of cricket we can easily determine the team which has the habit of tampering the ball and using crooky technicques to win the match and surely it was not India. So far Indians have played the game in a way how it is to be played, that is with true sportsmanship and like gentlemen. When we look at the end of first match we can easily find the team which was desperate to leave the field. The weather condition was the same through out the match. Probably if the score was three eleven for five they would have continued till the end of match. Probably i was a bit tensed after seeing the comments about the indian team. Anyway the match is over and i am not a great player to comment about the match.
One more information I started typing this post last night and i slept leaving the computer on. I woke up in the morning startled to see my computer still running. I switched on my computer at around 10 in night and i slept leaving the computer on and i woke up around 7 in the morning. This is not the first time that i am doing this. Should not repeat this again.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
All praise for Google
Google has started to rule the world of internet. Google programmers add something new to their product everyday. It could be noticed if one uses gmail from the begining. One of the impressive feature added to gmail is the integration of google chat inside gmail user inbox. So one would be able to chat with his friends once he enters gmail. There are many other features which i am still exploring. One such option is saving the gtalk converstations in our inbox. The chat window can be made to pop out of the mailbox or can be inside the mailbox while we browse our mails. The whole thing looks gr8 . I think google has made the option available for some of the users and soon it would be available for all. I got it in one of my five gmail accounts probably the one which i use often. With all these features Google is set to rock the world of internet. Hats off to Google
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Life is not short
Finally i found out when i am going to die. ha ha ha
Interesting Death Facts!
Interesting Fact #1: Eunuchs are MOST likely to be threatened by the mafia.
Interesting Fact #2: Guys are 10% MORE likely than gals to answer random math questions.
Interesting Fact #3: Guys are 8% MORE likely than gals to answer random math questions CORRECTLY.
Interesting Fact #4: Those who claim to "use to have guy parts, but now have gal parts" are predicted to die the soonest at 40; next are eunuchs at 42.
Interesting Fact #5: Approximately 3,500 people take this quiz DAILY
Interesting Death Facts!
Interesting Fact #1: Eunuchs are MOST likely to be threatened by the mafia.
Interesting Fact #2: Guys are 10% MORE likely than gals to answer random math questions.
Interesting Fact #3: Guys are 8% MORE likely than gals to answer random math questions CORRECTLY.
Interesting Fact #4: Those who claim to "use to have guy parts, but now have gal parts" are predicted to die the soonest at 40; next are eunuchs at 42.
Interesting Fact #5: Approximately 3,500 people take this quiz DAILY
Saturday, January 28, 2006
My Geek Score
Overall, you scored as follows:
29% scored higher (more computer geeky),
1% scored the same, and
70% scored lower (less geeky).
Compared to those in the same age group as you:
31% scored higher (more computer geeky),
1% scored the same, and
68% scored lower (less geeky).
Test Facts:
The average score for the gals is 38, while the guy average is 56.
Of the Computer Geek Quiz Takers:
17% are scared of links
17% of Windows users curse it
4% of Linux users selected Bill Gates as their hero
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