Harry in Pogo

Pogo's list of films for diwali has added delight to my diwali celebrations. Pogo is telecasting films under the name "diwali jadoo mantar" starting from oct 27 to Nov 1. Pogo has started with "Baby's Day Out" on oct 27 and is continuing with "Home Alone", "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", "Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets" and ends with "Richie Rich" on Oct 31.

Being a great fan of the boy wizard i was particularly interested in the Harry Potter movies. I have already seen the three Harry Potter movies two to three times. Still i wanted to see the first movie today and i enjoyed it. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", the fourth film is set for a grand release on Nov 18 in our country when i am in the middle of my semester exams. The book was awesome with the storyline moving on with the triwizard championship filled with suspense till the end. The trailors of the fourth movie looks good and i can't wait to see how the various events of the triwizard tournament have been depicted in the film. I am sure about seeing the movie but i have'nt decided about the date and time. As of now i have started reading the fifth book "Harry Potter and the order of Phoenix" and as usual it is mesmerising like the previous books.

Heavy Downpour in Madurai

Good to see heavy rain in Madurai after quite a long time. Today it has been raining from evening 7.00 and slight drizzling continued till 12 and it kept me waiting in Mattuthavani Busstand for around one hour from 7:30 to 8:30. It has been raining hard in Madurai for the past two weeks and today it was little high when compared to the other days. Already the kalvai(canal) near my house has started to overflow and water has started entering our area. Now our area looks like venice with houses surrounded fully by water. Almost all parts of Tamilnadu has received good rainfall and Mettur dam is already overflowing and most of the low lying villages of cauvery delta areashave been inundated. Last year Mettur dam was empty owing to lack of rain during monsoon season and this year it has reached its maximum limit within two weeks of rain. Last year the farmers were affected because of lack of rain and were fighting for release of water from Mettur and this year Mettur is full and water is going to the sea without any use. After some years Tamilnadu has received heavy rainfall and it has resulted in floods in many parts probably due to the lack of proper plan. Something needs to be done about this.

GNUGet Website Modified

Atlast i modified the GNUGet website on last weekend. I had been thinking about changing the website design for many months and i did it in the last weekend. I started it on saturday morning and i did it slowly starting with the design of the header picture for the website using GIMP. After sometime i was engaged in HomeAlone-3 in HBO and qualifying race of the final grand prix of the year - the chinese grand prix. After spending 2 - 3 hours on TV i started the website work again and it continued for the next day. So on sunday i finished the work with taking screenshotsof GNUGet for the screenshots page and finally uploaded the pages on Geocities on sunday night. The link is www.gnuget.tk. Check out the link and send feedbacks about the software and the website.

Local Channels Again

It may be a happy moment for many in madurai. The local channels have started their service again. On tuesday when i switched on the TV i was happy to see Media Television (looks like the old Madura TV). Then i spent about 30 minutes searching for the other channels. Soon i found Krishna and Vaigai. The local channels stopped their service around july 2003 when i was waiting to join my college. After two years they have started it again and now i can enjoy watching new songs, new films and good action hollywood movies. Except for the advertisements which run for around 15minutes everything is good. What is so good about the local channels is, there are no serials and they donot talk for 15 minutes before a song. Previosly there were around six or seven local channels like MCC, AMN etc. Now there only three channels. As of now they seem to have a very small collection of songs and the same songs keep repeating again and again and there are no movies. Waiting for other channels also. Hope they start it soon.

Night lab in college

Yesterday we had night lab in our college. It went well and i enjoyed a lot in the company of Subramani, Musi, Sen, Sara and vasanth. After the DAA seminar i returned to the lab at around 6:30pm and i am still in the lab and Now the time is 2:30 in the morning. We had a lot of fun here with the prefinal years(us) teasing the seniors and the seniors teasing us in turn. Probably sara was the most affected person. He left the lab like a guy running away from Tsunami and the Tsunami, i mean the reason was us. We teased him like anything and we were rolling on the floor laughing ==)) seeing the way he was trying to escape . Hope Sara did not get offended by the silly comments.

And after some time each of us proceeded with our work. The seniors were doing something related to their project. Subramani and myself were studying about PVM and were trying to correct a matrix multiplication program written using PVM. It took a lot of time and finally we found the solution to the problem at around 5:00am in the morning. Other guys were burning CD's for souvenir. Atlast we left the lab at 6:00am in the morning. It was a pleasant experience to spend whole night in the college along with other guys and seniors.

DAA seminar

Today we had the DAA seminar by Mr.Pandurangan. He gave an intersting talk on basics of algorithms. As it was the first session he gave just introduction about the algorithms like why one should study algorithm and the need for various algorithms. His speech was very interesting and it created a liking towards the algorithm. He taught us about the various paradigms of algorithm like pruning. Tommorow we have two sessions, first from 9.00am to 12.00am and the second session from 2.00pm to 5.00pm. Hope it goes well .

PVM tutorial link

This link contains tutorials about PVM starting from the Installation, configuration and setting up of PVM cluster and about the various methods used for programming in PVM along with their syntax.The html version of the tutorial is available at

www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/pvm-book.html

and the postscript version of the book is available at

www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/pvm-book.ps

Coder's Congregation

Coder's Congregation the online programming contest conducted as a part of our department symposium today was a great success. we had a good response to Coder's Congregation. The total number of participants reached 29 greatest in the past two years after online programming contest has been launched. We also had contestants from companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Trilogy. The event started sharply at 11am in the morning. Once the contest started the contestants were very fast and we got the first upload in just 10minutes. It was awesome to watch the status page getting changed so fast with uploads reaching us every few minutes. Sen was in online in trichy and we had Sriram here for online clarification of doubts about the programs. In the middle we encountered a problem with the status page but it was solved soon and the contest continued peacefully. We felt more elated on seeing the feedbacks. Most of them had appreciated about the way the event proceeded without interruption and about the questions. Some had given some valuable suggestions. Overall the event went well and we are happy about it.

First Seminar in College

I took my first seminar in college two weeks back in Java . I had relatively large topic to cover and it was fully on "The collectionframework" in Java. It lasted for around 2 hours. In the first hour i covered theCollection Interfaces and the Collection Classes and in the next hour which was on the next day i covered Maps. This seminar needs special mention as it is my first seminar after joining the college. After the seminar in Java, on Sep 16th i took a seminar in compiler design. It lasted for around twenty minutes. I didnot prepare fully so i wasnot able to teach in the way i wanted. Though these seminars make us study even before the internals, seminars like these help us in overcoming stage fear and improve ourpresentation skill.

FStival 05

FStival 05, the software freedom day was celebrated in our college on September 10th. It was a organised by GLUGOT and GlugMadurai. It was a good experience for us. The chief guest was Dr.M.Murali from AUKBC chennai. He gave a small and interesting talk about the philosophies and the ideologies of Free Software and OpenSource. It was good to meet our seniors Mr.Amalon Joe Steeve and Mr.Balamurugan. Joe has changed his hair style and Bams (balamurugan) had doubled in size after going to Bangalore. I gave the welcome address and in doing i so i gave PHD to joe by welcoming him as Dr.Amalon Joe Steeve. Praveen handled the MOC, Sen talked about the Glugot activities and Musi (muthusivam) gave the vote of thanks. We had a good support from our second years. They handled most of the stalls and we third years took GTK Glade and LAMP. Karthick Balaji from REC and Venkat of IT took GIMP and Shell Script. Altogether the Stalls was good. I felt more convinced when i finished my stall that is GTK Glade. But what still irks me is the crowd that turned up on that day. The total number of students from our college was very less. I still wonder why dont they turnout in large members. The meetings are also arranged for them but still they dont respond to it. That needs to be discussed.

After the software freedom day celebrations it was time for partying. First stop was at annan kadai in college with Bams sponsoring the little treat. Each one had a double Omlette and a slice while Joe was at ATM preparing f0r the next treat in Hotel Park in Palanganatham. As Bams was going to Dharmapuri he didnot come to next treat. So we went to park by 6:30 pm discussing a lot about the future plans with Joe doing most of the talking. And then in Park we had a nice treat which lasted till 9pm after which we departed. Hostel guys went to Thotti jaya but subramani, musi and myself returned home.