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 :(

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".

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.

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 :)

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.