The Fake One

Successfully completed the fake "HarryPotter and the deathly hallows" at the cost of one night sleep. Had the book even before the news about the book occupied the front pages of newspapers. First, read around two hundred pages and was convinced that it was fake as it deviated 100% from JKR's ways. Since the holidays were moving a lot slower decided to give it a try once again and finally completed few days back. Though i am sure it would be nowhere near the original work of JKR, it can called a reasonably good attempt. There was more of snogging, shagging and other stuffs and a little of story here and there. Looked like the story was developed from reviews and predictions of readers of the previous six books. Lacked foreshadowing, which has been the greatest tool of JKR in attracting the readers. Still it is a good attempt and hope the story of the real harry potter does not match with that of the fake one which most of the HP fans have already managed to read. The recent news is that there are still fifty more pages to be added to the already voluminous 659 pages of the fake one.

Walking down the memory lane

Was involved in the process of cleaning my room and found eight hall tickets, two hidden internal mark sheets, numerous test and assignment notes that made me nostalgic and took me back to the college days. Though the college life has ended, the memories continue to haunt. The four years gave different experiences, some good some bitter. Put together they look beautiful. Past looks beautiful as long as you enjoy the present. Here is a brief account of my four years in college.

First Year : During the first semester i was a sincere student and did nothing other than studying, writing assignments, doing maths tutorial etc etc. Got GPA of 9.0, the highest in my college life. During the EDC  class in second semester, got back the old habit of talking and singing. The guy responsible for this happens to be my friend sriram. During the first year i never missed A5 or B14 (buses).

Second Year : Became a member of the team maintaining TCENet, college intra net portal. Got the opportunity to meet a number of seniors. The seniors together formed a formidable team. Had a great time with them and learnt a lot from them too. It was there i got introduced to GNU/Linux, FOSS and mailing lists. Went to virtusa as a part of internship program, came back and contributed very little to the project AAOSK offered by team virtusa. Attended GLUGOT meetings, started studying PHP and started a small project called openquiz. Played a small role in organizing FStival'04, the software freedom  celebrations in college.

Third Year : CAS and Cyber 05 are the two notable things during the third year. Designed the web portal for Cyber 05. Cyber 05 gave a lot of experiences, some good, some bitter and both are fresh in
memory. Started the project Centralized Authentication System for the college. Parallel processing lab became a second home as night labs forced me to stay in lab most of the time. Successfully finished and launched CAS. Along with seniors organized FStival'05. Had a great time with the finalyear students. Switched over to B5, the last bus to college.

Final year : Placed in TCS and then in HP. In between had Honeywell interview where i managed to gather a bit of courage to argue with the interviewer. During the seventh semester, contributed to the redesigning of college website. Along with the third years organized FStival'06. During the final semester there was abrupt change in my character and found it very difficult to listen to classes. Spent time in class listening to stories of my friend vanni or sleeping peacefully. Spent most of the afternoon or project time in pump house. Left the habit of writing assignments on own and studying for internals. Started missing B5 and came five, ten or fifteen minutes late to college. Saw a lot of movies. Final year gave opportunities or enjoyment which i think i utilized well.

Dtracing to kill time

After a nice weekend with much shopping and roaming around main places of pune, i was virtually locked in my sister's home on monday without much to do. If not for the computer i would have found it difficult to kill time. Tested the opensolaris starter's kit and tried a bit of Dtrace. Though i dont know how to write even a single line of Dtrace script, the Dtrace toolkit in Belenix provided me a option. No wonder why there is a lot of rustle about Dtrace. Dtrace is awesome. Found the following script to be interesting. The script finds the total number of system calls made by each process.

dtrace -n 'syscall:::entry { @num[execname] = count(); }'

Found that init was making 61 system calls, fam made 4251, dtrace 7948 and xfce-panel process made 27163 system calls in a span of pproximately five minutes. Thought of installing opensolaris express but since the installer required around 704MB RAM, silently  removed the CD and sealed it for future use. Finally my mind drifted to gaming and started playing super tux in Belenix. Sometime later found Harrypotter and Warcraft games in windoze and from then haven't touched those Solaris DVDs at all. Dtrace is like a drug, it takes you to a different world and it is difficult to stay away from it for a long time.  Dont know when i will be Dtracing again but will surely do.

Post from pune

When half of my classmates are attending TCS training, i am chilling out myself in my sister's home in pune. It was a tough decision to take, but finally decided to bite the bullet. Anyway now i am here in pune enjoying my final holidays of student life. I was almost like a half roasted chicken after the two day journey in train. Pune felt like heaven when i finally got out of the train. The climate in pune is a lot cooler and it is a different summer i am experiencing here. Sun sets here only at 7:30pm. The markets are active only during the evening and there are very few shops in the morning. There are very few traffic signals and i rarely see traffic police even in the busiest roads. It is difficult to manage here without knowing Hindi. The hindi that i studied for three years in TVSLMHSS is helping a little and i am learning a lot of hindi. Still to visit a lot of  places, expecting this weekend to be busy.

Letting the luck decide

1568 in Maths, around 150 in physics and 150 in chemistry. Thats the number of centum holders in the subjects in +2. Total pass percentage is around 81. The first three marks with Tamil as first language are 1182, 1180 and 1179.With other languages it is 1190/1200.  All this is great but what follows this may not be. The selection process for Engineering seats seems to be laborious and old fashioned pushing aside the importance of marks and bringing in the other factors. From  what i heard, the engineering and medical ranks are decided based on the aggregate of Maths, Physics and chemistry and biology. If the aggregate is same then rank is based on individual marks in Maths, Physics and chemistry in order. If still there is a tie then choice of first language and marks in Tamil come into picture. If tie still exists then the seniority or DOB is used to break the tie. It the tie is still unbreakable then ranks is decided using lots. So it is like lottery where lucky ones get the seat.

So getting marks alone may not be sufficient to get Engineering seat or medical seat. Students need to have a lot of luck. Thousands may be getting the same aggregate for sure and luck will have a greater role this time. Happy that i did +2 before four years and i got last Computer Science seat in TCE by mere 0.01 difference. Thanks to the Common Entrance test we had, as engineering seat allocation was not by chance but by marks then. Abolishment of CET has done nothing to improve the situation but has successfully worsen it to a greater extent.

Opensolaris starter Kit

Yesterday got a fully sealed pack with US seals and custom verifications etc. It was none other than the Opensolaris starter kit. The kit contained two DVDs, the first one contains several live solaris distributions and the second one the solaris express. All that is fine but while ordering i forgot two things about my system and opensolaris. One is that my system still doesnot have a DVD reader and solaris does not run in 128MB RAM. So sealed the pack again and left it for future use. After Ananth's session on DTrace and ZFS i was eager to test them. But i would be stress testing my system if i try installing or running any distribution of solaris. Waiting for the first month salary to upgrade my system. Till then no other go should continue with the existing system. Grrrrrrrr....

Morons with power

"As an individual you can do something to the society, as a politician you can do anything". This was a comment made by one of my juniors in the group discussion session during Placement training. It happens to be 100% true. Past two days in Madurai has been a little tensed due the violence that started because of a stupid poll. The tamil daily dinakaran started a poll to find who will be karunanidhi's political heir. Dinakaran has being doing useless job like this for a long time. 70% voted for stalin it seems and only 2% for CM's elder son Azhagiri. This sparked a lot of violence and funny fact is that it was
headed by mayor of madurai. Finally the violence became uncontrollable, as police did not take any steps to control it and ended with the death of three Dinakaran employees.

What followed this incident is something unacceptable. Police made fake arrests still leaving the one who is reponsible. Cable TV operators were afraid of transmitting, as it would spread news. People never seemed to mind what is happening and were thankful that they were spared. This makes my conclusion valid. My conclusion is that politicians = fools with power, police = mindless morons, TN people = 100% ignorant. Politics will continue to remain as a garbage as long as educated stay away from it.

Now i am an engineer...

This post is totally irrelavant to those who do not know me.

Now i can proudly add the two letter B.E. to the end of my name. Successfully completed bachelor of engineering and now i am one among the engineers of India. Results were announced yesterday (7th may) when none of us were expecting it. But it did not do any harm. After three semesters of same mark 8.29 it was good to get something more than that. This time GPA was 8.53.

It is interesting to see the GPA and CGPA curve. The GPA started with reasonably good mark in first semester, 9.0. After that it turned out to be a monotonically decreasing sequence with GPAs 8.97, 8.86, 8.57, 8.29, 8.29, 8.29. Atlast in the final semester it is 8.53. The CGPA curve looks more like a straight line with negative slope. Anyway now its all over and its an happy ending to the college life.

Trip to kodaikanal

Will try to keep this post small and simple. Went to kodaikanal, the nearest hill station to Madurai. The three days trip was filled with fun. This turns out to be my fourth visit to Kodaikanal and kodai is no longer a strange place. Nothing has changed in Kodaikanal. Though the first day was little hot, the second day turned out to be like what we expected. The second day was a lot cooler and the cool breeze increased the delight. We were walking through the mist in places shanthi valley view and guna caves.

As usual the nights went faster as we engaged ourselves in cards. It was the usual Ace game with little difference. The difference is that the person who manages to lose four consecutive games and collect all the four aces should take bath in the ice cool water in the middle of Kodai night. One of our friend successfully achieved the feat and took bath in the middle of the night. We had an oppurtunity to see sai baba who was on kodai. We managed to catch a glimpse of the bisons during the return journey. Nothing has changed in Kodai. It is the same old hill station with really inviting climatic conditions and places that offer stupendous view of the valley below. Managed to take lot of photos but yet to upload them in picasa .

An early visit to the exhibition

We went to the Madurai exhibtion last week. As hostel friends would be leaving home early we planned an early visit and ended up seeing how the shops are built. The exhibition looked a lot different with very little crowd and very few shops. It was a different experience.  As there were very few shops and entertainment aspects we were walking around the whole ground chatting and at times peeking into the shops. Usually the policemen, with the thought of being more vigilant and people friendly are usually hard on college students moving around as a group. This time it did not happen.  We ended up visiting stalls put up by the police department, wildlife department, fisheries, IT department, Madurai corporation. The stalls were informative and were the only place where one could spend some time. One interesting information is that, the road from thiruparankundram C2 police station (TCE college stop) to Thiruparankundram stands second in the road list where more number of accidents happen. Surely, it was not the right time to visit madurai exhibition but its a different exhibition i have seen. Soon it would reach its peak and would demand one more visit. Think that visit would be a lot different.