Saturday, September 29, 2007

Chak De India

The opportunity to see "Chak de India" came in the form of team outing. Yesterday i was at Inox along with my team members to see "Chak De India". The movie turned out to be a great entertainer. The director managed to create magic with Sharukh Khan and 11 other girls. The story starts with a high tension hockey final between India and Pakistan. Indian lose because of miscalculated penalty shot by Shahrukh, who is the captain. After the match shahrukh is accused of getting bribes and is pushed out of  the team. He returns to hockey after 7 years as the coach of Indian women hockey team. How he solves the differences that exist between the team and what they achieve forms the rest of the story.

Shahrukh looks a lot matured and as usual does the role well. Dialogues are plus point but with little knowledge in hindi i could pickup only a few. The hockey matches look realistic. It was a great performance altogether and is a movie worth watching many times.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

World Cup Atlast :)

Finally found some time to blog. So many things to blog about but could not find the right time. Finally had to sneak into browsing center near my home to post about the topic that half of India is chanting now. The victory of the Men in Blue against their arch rivals. I did not get an opportunity to see the match as we did not have a TV at home and was looking at my system's monitor eagerly waiting for the scores to get updated. Finally had to call my friend who managed to settle in a hotel to hear the commentary. He did a fine job indeed in updating ball by ball status and also in describing  the

If i am right this is the first time India and Pak are meeting in final of a great event like the world cup. If it was some other team the fans here might have digested a defeat, i doubt whether it would be the same against Pak. Anyway the end result was great and Men in Blue continued the winning streak against Pak in both the world cup and the T20 World Cup. Hats off to them. I don't know how the Indian team handled the pressure during the final overs but we were at the edge of our seats when the final over was bowled. When the final wicket fell, crackers lit up the sky. The celebration continued late night.  Finally India has won the world cup.

Monday, September 24, 2007

My Remembrall - Emacs Planner

Started using yet another feature of Emacs. The latest feature i am using is the Planner mode in Emacs. I was badly in need of a something to keep track of things as the silly little brain of mine was not able to keep track of everything. What i wanted was some sort of mechanism to remind me about the work i have and tasks that i need to complete. But what emacs gave was something different. Emacs Planner has a lot of features than what i expected. All you need to use planner in emacs is to download Planner and Muse and copy it into elisp folders or home folders and add configure your .emacs file to load planner. Planner requires the wiki feature of Muse so it is necessary to install Muse first. To get planner working for you, there is a detailed procedure starting from emacs installation to installing and configuring Planner. This link http://pigpog.com/node/1974 contains a step by step procedure to install emacs, install and configure planner and steps to use planner.

If the topic does not make sense to you, read this.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Twenty20 - Namma Game

Atlast found some time and a topic to blog :)

The last time i played some cricket was when i studied Xth standard. The way we played the game was mazing. The match consisted was of maximum of ten overs. The main aim of the batsman was to see the ball and swing the bat with full speed so that it crosses the boundary. Running between the wickets was funny, most of the time no one noticed where the batsmen hit the ball. Wherever it is, they ran and were successfull at times.

When i saw the Twenty20 match last week, it looked to me like there is a striking similarity between the T20 and the street cricket we played. There is nothing to test except for the arm power of the batsmen. Bowlers were always at the receiving end. There is a fair chance for every team to win the match. Seeing the aggressiveness shown by the Bangaladesh batsmen in hitting the ball, looked like even they too had a chance. Looked to me like the match result depends on two or three overs. 20 - 25 runs in a over would change the entire game.

From the normal spectator perspective, T20 is awesome. Who would not like three hours of cricket match filled with sixes and fours with equal probablity of a wicket falling. T20 is absolute fun. I usually forget about the matches till i hear the roar from the nearby hostel or call from my father telling the score.

Monday, September 17, 2007

FStival '07

It was the first FStival i attended as an aluminus. It was a great feeling to visit the college again and meet the juniors and staffs out there. I went a little late after going to my home and i missed praveen's speech and the installation session. Heard that praveen gave an inspiring speech and inspite of some problems with the installation, juniors managed to finish the session in a good note. When i entered the KS auditorium, Subramani was explaining some cool compiz features and 3D desktops. After that there was a doubt clarification session during which i got the opportunity to poke my nose and utter few words.

After then it was time for the demo stalls. As usual we had stalls like GCC, GDB, Emacs, Databases, CMD, LAMP, GIMP, Games & Multimedia etc. Vim and "Linux Day to day" stalls were added this time.This time Juniors did a fine job with the demo stalls and were explaining with good examples. For the first time i saw juniors explaining Blender with some real animations. Almost all of them did fine in explaining the functionalities of the softwares. Regarding the audience, this time we had a diverse crowd ranging schools and colleges in and around Madurai and from other departments.

After all this it was time for fill the tummy and we proceeded to hotel Bell for the treat that was pending for a very long time.Praveen, Subramani and myself atlast treated our juniors :) After that headed back home to enjoy the remaining one day at home.

Managed to take only very few snaps. Check them out at http://picasaweb.google.com/sens2003

Thursday, September 13, 2007

An inspiring article

As usual was reading one of the tamil weeklies, this time it was "Kumutham" because could not get Anantha vikadan. Apart from a lot of cinema news which i was mainly looking for, one article caught my attention. It was about "Importance of Time", something i never paid much attention. The way the article started was impressive. It started with comparing time with that of money since we(Namma ooru makkal) concentrate more on money and may easily understand the concept. And then it went on to calculate the salary for a minute.

If the salary for one month is 15600, then 15600/(30*24*60) = 36 paise. The point is that people who think a lot before wasting money, dont do the same before wasting time. It also claimed that time is the only thing that can be converted into growth, love, money etc etc. Hmmm seems to be true, but difficult to follow.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

The Diwali Rush

This happened on Sep 7th friday. I went to office as usual and got prepared to book the train ticket for going home on Nov 6th for diwali. I expected that there would be atleast some tickets left but the entire calculation went wrong. By the time i opened the page to book ticket it was all over. Later learnt that most of my friends in office had the similar fate. None of them were successful. One more news is that, a person who stood third in the queue in railway station was not able to book the ticket

If this is the status of those who have internet access, think about the status of those who don't have access to the technology. If you ask any bangalore local here about this, the first reason he would site is the "explosion of s/w industry" here in the garden city. It has changed the entire life style of the people living here. There exist a visible partition between the techies and the other section of the people. Though the software industry has helped in the growth of the city it has created an apparent division among the two classes of people.  Though most of them will have difference of opinion in this regard, think this is the reason for incidents where techies get beaten up for no reason. The matter to be worried now is "booking ticket successfully for the return journey". Hope i am lucky this time :)

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Chak De India

This post is definitely not about the movie but about the great match between India and England. After a disgusting performance in the world cup by Team India,  i decided not to pay much attention to the matches or the controversies involving cricket. But habits die hard, yesterday in a mess near my home happened to catch glimpse of the match. Soon i found myself focussing on the match more than that of the Chicken in front of me. Sachin's blistering knocks were visual treats. Though i ate slowly could not delay it beyond a certain level. At home could not sit peacefully and finally called my father at night to know the result. When i called my dad, India needed 4 runs from 3 balls and heard that Uthapa finished it in style. The noise and sound of crackers from the nearby mansion announced the mood of cricket maniacs like me. India seems to be in great form, but i am still doubtfull as India is capable of producing suprises. So i am waiting for the result of the final match with my fingers crossed. Hope they do well and come back home with  both the one day and test cup.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Uneventful Weekend

Never thought i would be going to Subramani's home so soon after last week adventure. But i was there the last weekend, unable to beat the boredom. As usual had a great lunch at Maharaja and then with great difficulty killed the laziness and geared up for a visit to the Kempfort shiva temple. Only the entrance to the temple is small, the statues of the deities in the temple are huge. The temple is well maintained and is worth visiting.

The next day we settled for a movie. This time it was a hindi movie. It was none other than the great "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai", the movie i had seen for more than fifteen times. Still had the same feeling when
i saw movie for the first time. Because of the sub titles was able to understand the movie a little better. Killing time during weekends is becoming a herculean task. Thanks to the friends and seniors here, without them life would be pretty difficult here.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Exporting Linux Display to Windows

Never knew something like this existed until i started using it on Friday. As the topic suggests it is possible to get the display of the remote GNU/Linux machine in you Windoze or any other OS. All it needs to do is to install an Xserver in the local machine. For Windoze, Xserver can be installed using the Xming package available in sourceforge. The exact location of the xming xserver is http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming. Download and install the Xming server in the machine and run it with the option ":0 -clipboard -multiwindow -ac". To change the options in windoze, right click the short cut and add "-ac" option to the list of option already available.

The steps to be done in the GNU/Linux machine is very simple, all you have to do is to export the DISPALY environment variable. So execute the command like

export DISPLAY=ipaddress:0.0

where ipaddress is the IP of the windoze machine. Now opening any GUI application like xcalc or xemacs or xterm will open a window in the Windows machine.  Though it is a well known fact that GNU/Linux command line is far more powerful, looks like this finds a use in a number of situation.

"Anantha Vikadan" to the rescue

Since i moved out of my home town to the place where i work, there is very little i hear about what is happening in my state. One thing i missed was the news about tamil movies. About three months before, most of the time was spent in college was spent on watching or atleast talking about the latest releases, actors, actresses etc.  But after coming here i was virtually cut off from the tamil cinema world.

It was at this point of time, "Anantha Vikadan" helped me. Though it was not available at all shops here, i was lucky to find a shop near my home. This was the first time i am spending time on tamil weeklies like this. "Anantha Vikadan" looks pretty good. They provide the latest news in tamil cinema like "Vidyabalan would be the heroine of Vijay's next film Kuruvi". One interesting article was about the life of "Che Guevera" the revolutionist. The short stories are also interesting, so are the little jokes. There are also pages that offer some insight into the current affairs of Tamilnadu politics. On the whole "Anantha Vikadan" is helping me in killing time and knowing something about what is happening in my state.