Guru

Not much to comment. Guru turned out to be a great movie where brilliance of both Maniratnam and Abishek reached the pinnacle. we went there for the night show of the first day with the sponsor being senior senthilkumaran. Maniratnam's fame had brought in a large crowd and we were able to get the ticket as we went there before one hour. Guru lived up to our hopes. The story takes you back by around 40 years and is about the ordeals of a businessman with great dreams. Though songs come with the best blend of ARR and Vairamuthu not all songs please our ears. A tamil movie with the same story and tamil hero and heroine would be a sure hit. Overall the movie is a little fast paced and looks like a competitor for the top slots.

The Second Expedition

This time we were off to alagarkovil a hill resort which derives a lot of historical significance from Kalazhagar temple and Palamudhirchozhai temple of Lord Muruga. It was the usual 6 with the additions being Shanoof and two guys from Information Technology department, Sukumar and Seenivasan. This time the trip was not as  interesting and difficult as the previous one to TPK hills. Our intention was to keep away from the normal path as far as possible but we were forced to stick on to the original path. The reason being almost all reachable parts were polluted and the smell emanating was little more than nauseating. Alagarkovil has turned into a perfect example of a place where man has used his full power to pollute to the greatest extent possible. We still managed to explore the places that have escaped from humans and look a little better. This time i had the camera with me and we managed to take a lot of pictures. The walk to the top of the hill turned out to be a long one as we almost stopped at every small shop in the road and  were taking snaps at almost every location possible. Finally we returned back at around 4 and made the next stop at eco park. Eco park looks good with green grasses everywhere and natural and artificail trees adding some more beauty. Finally returned home after the long trip to catch a long undisturbed sleep. Yet upload the photos. Will upload and post the status.

Trek To TPK Hills.

It was a scorcher and it looked like the sun was trying with all its might to stop us. But we went on without minding the sun, fueled by the sudden enthusiasm that we acquired after we entered the final semester. The plan was to climb Thiruparankundram hills and explore a bit of it. It turned out to be an unforgettable experience. At first climbing the steps turned out to be a breath taking task. After that climbing the hills and rocks did not burn much of the calories though they looked a lot dangerous. In the begining the hills were not steep but as we climbed higher and higher it became an arduous task. But we never felt tired, and reached even those spots that were a lot steeper. Looked like we scaled every reachable point in the hill. The view of the city from the hill top was panoramic. We could see half of Madurai from the hill top. Thought there was a path with well built steps the shortcuts through the bushes and rocks were more inviting. The trek would have lost its luster if not for Vanniaperumal's Nokia N73 with 3.2 megapixel camera. We were able to take some good snaps with that. The best snap being the one showing Mr.Musi attempting a free fall dive into the rocks. Fortunately he escaped unscathed, though his jeans suffered some injury. If some misadventures like those are not taken into account, it could be called a great experience. It is a place in Madurai where u could isolate yourself from the maddening crowd and enjoy sometime with your friends. After spending about two hours in hill climbing and photography we returned back to the maddening crowd reluctantly. For the inquisitive readers, members constituting "we" include Musi, Praveen, Myself, Subramani, Sriram and Vanni. Managed to upload the files in picasa and they are available at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/sens2003

Thiruvilaiyadal : Comedy galore

Thiruvilaiyadal manages to keep the crowd roaring with laughter from the begining to the end. A great movie that comes with overdoze of humour. Thiruvilaiyadal rightly named potrays the game played by Dhanush with Prakash Raj. The story is the long existing story of a low class youth falling in love with the heroine. As usual it is love at the first sight. Dhanush falls in love with Shriya at the first sight. Shriya's brother Prakash Raj is the villain who tries to get rid of Dhanush from his sister. He fixes a price for Dhanush's love. Dhanush accepts the money, and how he uses the money and how he manages to get shriya form the rest of the story. Though the story is something that u see in most of the tamil movies, the way in which the story is handled in Thiru... is amazing. Dialogues are a major plus point. Dhanush performance masks every other thing. Some songs may capture attention. On the whole Thiru... is one of the great movie iatched after a long time.

Preparing disk images for running Bochs

This is the first step that i learnt before two years when i learning OS. But inspite of seniors best effort to make us understand i think we understood only half. It was proved when we were trying to run bochs for our final year project. The task was to create the disk images and to install grub in the disk images to boot our kernel. We had a vague idea about the steps that we followed in our second year and finally figured out the right way and understood a lot. Some juniors were also asking us about how to run bochs for the first time. So thought of posting about it.

Creating disk images : The first step would be to create disk images. The utility available with bochs called as bximage can be used to reate disk images. Create a floppy disk image by specifying fd as the disk type and a hard disk image of size 10MB by specifying hd as the disk type while using bximage.

Partitioning the hard disk image : Then the harddisk should be partitioned. For this purpose we use some small linux distributions ike dlxlinux. Using bochs boot with dlxlinux image as the master disk nd the created disk image as the slave. Once dlxlinux is booted use fdisk to partition the slave disk as "fdisk /dev/hdb". Create a new partition and then create ext2 filesystem on the partition using the command mk2efs /dev/hdb1.

Copying the grub files into the disk image: After partitioning the disk image file we should copy the grub files into the image. To do this attach the image file as a loop device and then mount the loop device. These steps will require root previlege

losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop/0 diskimage
mount /dev/loop/0 /mnt/loop
cp /boot/ /mnt/loop/
cp kernel /mnt/loop/boot
Edit the menu.lst file to boot the kernel.
umount /mnt/loop
losetup -d /dev/loop/0

Installing grub in the disk image: After the grub files are copied the next step is to install grub on the hard disk image. This is where the floppy disk image we created earlier comes into use. Attach the floppy disk image as a loop device and use grub-floppy command tocreate bootable floppy disk image. The commands would look like

losetup /dev/loop/0 floppyimage
grub-floppy /dev/loop/0
losetup -d /dev/loop/0

Once the boot floppy image is created edit the bochsrc file to boot from the floppy with our hard disk image as the master disk. Now bochs boots the floppy disk image and u get the grub command prompt. Once the grub command prompt is obtained follow the long established steps of root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0) to install grub on the harddisk image. Now u can test ur own kernel using bochs. Bochs reads its configuration setting from the file bochsrc. This is the file that instructs bochs about the master disk or slave disk or disk to boot etc.

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 :)