A Tech Feast

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

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

Something Something Unakum Enakum - Has Something in it

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

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

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

Removing "Edit Primary Link" in Drupal

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

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

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

Fascinating FLOSS

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

A dream comes true

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

Breaking the code

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 ........